An interesting piece by Mona Charen at the Boston Herald
Democrats have to get serious about climate change
Do you ever wonder why people run for office? I mean, unless you’re a total cynic, you must assume that at least part of the motivation is wanting to do good. Sure, those who run for office want fame and prestige, but they also have strongly held views and want to affect public policy, right? So why in the world would they engage in sabotage of the ideas they hope to advance?
That’s undeniably what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have done with their juvenile Green New Deal.
Consider: The caricature of environmentalists is that they are just using climate change as a stalking horse for their true agenda, which is to socialize the entire economy. And lo and behold, what does the Green New Deal resolution call for? Net zero carbon emissions in 10 years, universal health care, guaranteed jobs for all, paid family leave, paid vacations, refurbishing every single building in the country to meet environmental standards, eliminating nuclear power and on and on. In fact, most of the resolution doesn’t even address climate change. Here’s a flavor:
The Green New Deal seeks “To promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’).â€
Okaaaaay. So what Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have achieved, along with all of the Democrats who’ve endorsed this childish wish list, is to make themselves look like dummies and to reinforce the impression that they are totally unserious about combating climate change.
They are unserious about solving the problem they say exists. And the GND shows it. It encapsulates what this whole thing is about, claiming there’s a problem and using it to solve every other Leftist issue. It creates bigger and bigger government, more control over our lives, more control of the economy. Everything. More taxes and fees. Limiting how people move around the country. Trying to force people into big cities.
Ms. Charen goes on to point out that one method for “solving” anthropogenic climate change, mainly in terms of carbon dioxide output, is nuclear power, which the GND is 100% against.
The greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were achieved by France in the 1970s and ’80s when the country made a big switch to nuclear energy. They reduced their carbon emissions by 2 percent per year while still providing their people with affordable energy.
Heck, Hans Blix, who was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997, and was the head of U.N. inspectors in Iraq from 2000 to 2003, argues that nuclear energy is the way forward. It is cheap, reliable, and pretty safe. There have been very few incidents in all the decades it has been used. There have been three accidents in all this time. And few died. Skeptics might not agree on anthropogenic climate change, but, we could agree on the use of nuclear power to replace coal and oil.
They won’t agree to it, though. They’d rather hold to their guns and want to put up tons of wind turbines which only work when the wind blows and solar panels which do not work without the sun, which provide little energy for the cost and size of their footprint.
