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Wednesday, May 26, 2021

"What Biden And The Environmental Left Are Really Planning For Us'

 Source:

" ... candidate Biden repeatedly denied on the debate stage that he had any plans to ban “fracking” for oil and gas.

... you really need to take a look at the “Interim Final Recommendations” just released on May 13 from something called the “White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.”

You haven’t heard of this Council?

It’s a new Biden administration thing.

... I don’t actually recognize any of the names of the members, but their affiliations are listed, consisting of one after another of far-left environmental advocacy groups. It looks like the members then got right to work.

The so-called “Interim Final Recommendations” document is some 91 pages long, and every page contains something more extreme, more preposterous, and more destructive than even the page before.

The short version is that all compromise positions and half-way measures are to be rejected.

Only wind and solar power are acceptable, and the only route to get there is direct government order and/or spending.

... any other alternatives are racist.

The bulk of the document deals with what they call the “Justice40 Initiative,” by which the Executive Order seeks “recommendations on how certain Federal investments might be made toward a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits flow to disadvantaged communities.”

If there is any concern that existing federal law prohibits discrimination in federal grants on the basis of race or gender, nothing here suggests it. ...

... they identify the “[k]ey components that require further development for effective implementation of Justice40,” of which the first one is:

Identifying the programs and policies federal (investments) in that can be included in Justice40.

I’ve tried reading that ten times, but can’t make any sense of it.

... after reading through a few dozen pages of bureaucratese, we finally come on pages 55-59 to lists of types of projects that are acceptable and unacceptable,

or in their words, projects that “may benefit a community,”  and projects that “will not benefit a community.

” The second list would exclude all fossil fuel projects, but that is only the very beginning.

1. Fossil fuel procurement, development, infrastructure repair that would in any way extend lifespan or production capacity, transmission system investments to facilitate fossil-fired generation or any related subsidy.

So everything even remotely related to fossil fuel energy generation is completely out, even maintaining the facilities we already have.

... Here are the next (items) that “will not benefit a community”:

2. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)

3. Direct air capture

4. The procurement of nuclear power

They give no explanation for why nuclear is unacceptable.

Hey, it “will not benefit a community.”

You may be getting the impression that all the most extreme positions of the environmental left are getting accepted without question, without any real consideration of actual impacts on either the climate or “disadvantaged communities.”

The farther you read, the more that becomes clear.

Here are a few more items that are not to be allowed:

    Research and development

    The establishment or advancement of carbon markets, including cap and trade

    Geoengineering and techno fixes

    Highway expansion

    Road improvements or automobile infra-structure, other than electric vehicle charging stations

    Industrial scale bio-energy

    Incentives for investor-owned utilities

    Projects that promote gentrification without any housing policy crafted by a community to prevent displacement

And then of course we need to weave “anti-racism” and critical race theory through the whole enterprise:

Overall Goals and/or Requirements for Investment Benefits:

Addressing institutional racism. . . .

Reparations to address past harm and disproportionate burdens. . . .

Be Actively Anti-Racist - We pursue policies and strategic investments to reverse racial inequities and strive to repair the environmental injustice of more than 500 years of institutional policies and practices. . . .

... if you have thought that the right approach for a Republican to take is to try to reach some kind of compromise on emissions reductions,

maybe through a carbon tax, or carbon pricing, or promoting nuclear power, or something else like that, think again.

We are dealing here with completely crazed zealots, bent on a moral crusade to save the world.

With a complete absence of adult supervision in the Biden Administration, these people have taken over and are running the show.

At this point, the best we can hope for is that they will actually implement some of this nonsense, and it will then fail spectacularly."