President Biden is telling us how wonderful high gas prices are, and saying we’re going through an incredible transition away from fossil fuels: “God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger, and the Dr world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.” God willing, Mr. President, we’ll still have an economy.
Sky-high gasoline prices, including for diesel and natural gas, are not the answer. We are never going to replace fossil fuels, regardless of whether the president or his climate tsar, John Kerry, understand this. Even though electric cars are great, Mr. Biden won’t invite Tesla’s Elon Musk to the White House because he runs a nonunion shop, and now he’s for free speech as he eyes Twitter. Worse, he says he’s going to vote Republican. Even Elon Musk has called for stepped up production of oil and gas.
The only thing missing from President Biden’s “I like high gas prices” speech is that he didn’t say it in Davos, where all the climate nuts are gathered to sing the praises of a fossil fuel-free future and to trash capitalism. Like they always do.
I’ve been to a couple of those Davos meetings, but only because I was forced to accompany President Trump.
It’s not a wonderful experience: hundreds or thousands of CEOs and their fellow travelers extolling radical green policies and trashing free-market capitalism. Really, CEOs doing this. People you would think might know better. Yet they no longer know better. There isn’t a blue collar worker within three continents of Davos.
That is the problem: People who drive semis or pickups and their livelihoods depend on it, they’re just dying to have $10 gas or diesel. Traveling salespeople, who cover large swaths of the country, they’re just dying to have $10 gas.
Heck, this is true for people who live in the New York metropolitan area, who can’t get power, air-conditioning, home heating, or gasoline, because their goofball Democratic governors have completely shut down access to fossil fuels.
One state away, in Pennsylvania, there’s prosperity because the governor, actually a Democrat, years ago opened the door to drilling and pipelining fossil fuels from the great Marcellus shale.
In Western New York, though, there’s none of it — just a few blocks away from the Pennsylvania border. Reminds me of East and West Berlin during the old days. Instead of creating jobs or rejuvenating a long-moribund part of New York State, the lefties running New York would much rather import oil and gas from Russia.
At Davos, Mr. Kerry the climate tsar talks about how many people are getting killed due to drought, fires, mudslides, floods, storms — but in fact none of this is true.
As Bjorn Lomborg has written repeatedly, deaths from climate-related events have been plunging for more than 100 years. For example, in the 1920s almost half a million people were killed by climate-related disasters. Last year it was less than 7,000. Climate-related disasters have killed 99 percent fewer people than 100 years ago. We are safer from climate disasters than ever before, no matter what climate-crazed activists or their media allies may tell us.
A former EPA director, Scott Pruitt, recently criticized the extremist Biden view of climate. All this business of direct, indirect, or cumulative enviro metrics is useless in a world where technology improves climate by leaps and bounds.
The natural gas revolution is just one example. The U.S. has the lowest carbon emissions of any of the big countries. Mr. Pruitt mentioned the promising advances in carbon sequester and storage, something that has been developing rapidly, and widely.
Nobody can predict the future, but in a prosperous world, with typical American wealth creation, we will have the resources to develop the know-how by smart entrepreneurs to make air and water cleaner and cleaner. That is our history. We don’t need outrageous energy prices that will ratchet up inflation and crash the economy, devastating middle-class American workers along the way. There is no reason why fossil fuels can’t coexist with renewables and nuclear in the next 100 years. We used to call it “all of the above.”
As far as Mr. Biden’s so-called incredible transition, though, that is a bit of a woke ideological root canal without Novocaine inflicted on the American economy, in an utterly unnecessary strategy.
This is part of some progressive dream, what Newt Gingrich calls “big government socialism.” It is a bad dream. It is a dream that must end. We will not restore high growth and low inflation until we rid ourselves of this nightmarish progressive dream. Need I say it again? The cavalry’s coming.
* Article from: The New York Sun
