Even as demagogic campaign rhetoric goes, Joe Biden’s speech earlier this week about Trump as a “climate arsonist” was exceptionally absurd. He blamed Trump in effect for not controlling the weather, implying that a Biden presidency would eliminate extreme weather events. Barack Obama famously said that he could stop the rise of the oceans. Biden is making similarly grand claims. Apparently we won’t suffer wildfires anymore once he becomes president.
Biden’s America is a fantasyland in which clean energy jobs are plentiful and everyone drives electric cars.
“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires, how many suburban neighborhoods will be flooded out, how many suburbs will be blown away in superstorms?” said Biden. “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anybody be surprised when more of America is under water?”
In his desperate pandering to the far Left, Biden’s apocalyptic rhetoric grows more and more ludicrous. Should Biden win the presidency, he will possess no power to control the weather, but he will wield powers with which to cripple the economy. What would throw America into crisis is not the environment but Biden’s environmentalism.
He is proposing trillions of dollars in new spending for his “Green New Deal,” a program based upon the most extreme form of climate change alarmism that will even exceed the job-crippling policies of the Obama administration. Biden will knock down one of the pillars of the economy, the energy sector, eliminating countless jobs for coal miners and others. To Biden, that is no big deal. He has cavalierly told coal miners, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well…. Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake.”
But the retraining of coal workers is not so easy. Even assuming they find jobs, those new jobs pay much less than their previous work. According to the Hill, “the jobs that former coal workers usually find tend to pay only $12 to $15 dollars per hour as opposed to the approximate $75,000 a year salary that coal workers had while working the mines.”
Biden’s America is a fantasyland in which clean energy jobs are plentiful and everyone drives electric cars. He is upset that only one million electric cars are on the road. He is going to change that by pressuring governors into supporting the “deployment of more than 500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030.” In the meantime, Biden would like to see Americans riding trains more often. Toward that end, his campaign promises, “He will make progress toward the completion of the California High Speed Rail project. He will expand the Northeast Corridor to the fast-growing South. Across the Midwest and the Great West, he will begin the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American.”
How will Biden pay for this? By raising taxes. He is sure Americans would prefer a “Clean Energy Revolution” to tax cuts. “The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment,” he says. “The Biden plan will be paid for by reversing the excesses of the Trump tax cuts for corporations, reducing incentives for tax havens, evasion, and outsourcing, ensuring corporations pay their fair share, closing other loopholes in our tax code that reward wealth not work, and ending subsidies for fossil fuels.”
Into Biden’s White House will come the most wild-eyed, anti-business environmentalists imaginable. Should their plans succeed, energy costs will soar, in addition to many other problems. And for what? Biden’s Green New Deal will have no real impact on the Earth’s temperature. It is nothing more than a symbolic sacrifice of the economy on the altar of delusional environmentalism.
In recent days California has been in the news for wildfires and blackouts. Biden addressed the former and ignored the latter. But should he win, we can expect both.
George Neumayr is author of The Biden Deception.
