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James Delingpole explains in Spectator USA “Green economics belongs more to the province of magical unicorns than to a functioning free-market economy.” He writes:
What could be more emblematic of the American Dream than fracking, the miracle technology that has created thousands of real jobs, lowered the cost of living, generated wealth and prosperity, boosted competitiveness and helped make the United States not just energy independent, but a net exporter of natural gas and petroleum products for the first time in decades?
And what could be more characteristic of the elitist, small-minded, anti-market, anti-blue-collar, anti-growth, green-obsessed liberal-left than that the Democratic party is hell-bent on banning it?
On the contrary, most of the Democratic presidential hopefuls either want to curtail its use or ban it altogether. Mike Bloomberg says that ‘gas isn’t as clean as we thought’. He wants to ‘get [it] out of as many homes and buildings as we can’ and stop the construction of new gas plants.
The Green New Deal, which proposes the complete transformation of America’s energy economy, is based on several hopeless misconceptions. Replacing shale gas with renewables simply wouldn’t be feasible.
It’s partly, too, because renewables are so excruciatingly expensive — a cost which inevitably ends up being borne by aggrieved energy users and taxpayers, hitting the poorest hardest of all.
In any case, unilaterally decarbonizing the United States won’t make a dent in global CO2 emissions reduction when competitors such as India, China and now Brazil are growing their fossil-fuel output like crazy.
Green economics belongs more to the province of magical unicorns than to a functioning free-market economy — not to mention its corrupt crony capitalism and its exploitation and impoverishment of regular working folk. The middle Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, the people who dig stuff and make stuff and grow stuff, possess far too much common sense to be persuaded otherwise.
Written by James Delingpole. This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition.
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