Recently a colleague of mine, David Wojick, Ph.D., opined that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s climate and energy plans are full of promises Biden can’t keep. Wojick is correct in the sense that Biden makes many promises he can’t enact through executive actions alone. Unfortunately, I fear Wojick is being far too optimistic about whether Congress would go along with the crazy climate initiatives Biden has promised.

Even if the presidency and both houses of Congress fall into the Democrats’ hands in the 2020 elections, Congress will shy away from enacting the climate restrictions Biden is pushing, Wojick argues. But most of these policies come from his advisors, who are in fact among the most radical members of Congress—think Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—and they’ve pushed these policies even in the current divided government. Think what they would do if presented with even full control of the federal government.

For years, these delusional climate alarm Chicken Littles and some Republican allies have pushed policies that would wreck the economy. Why believe they won’t practice what they preach if the Democrats finally get virtually unfettered power?

Wojick correctly points out Biden’s climate policies would cost trillions of dollars, but that erects no barriers to a Congress that just spent trillions of dollars with little concern for fiscal responsibility during the pandemic, much less a legislature controlled entirely by Democrats with no ability for fiscal conservatives to keep them in check. To avoid the electoral punishment Wojick warns of, these aging, experienced, radical political mandarins (such as Raul Grijalva, D-AZ, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI) will simply establish a timeline sufficiently distant in the future for meeting the policy targets that the full impact won’t be felt until after they have died or left office, likely for cushy jobs with green energy or green consulting companies that benefit from the climate laws they will pass under Biden.

What would Biden’s climate policies entail?

Many of the climate policy promises Biden has made come straight out of the Green New Deal (GND) handbook. In February 2019, I broke down some of the incursions on personal freedom that would flow from the GND if it were to become law. At the cost of trillions of dollars, Biden’s climate plans, like the GND, would require a complete makeover of the economy and peoples’ lives within only 10 to 15 years.

“There’s no more consequential challenge that we must meet in the next decade than the onrushing climate crisis,” said Biden in announcing his Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice, taken from the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. Biden’s plan says “the United States … must achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, and no later than 2050. To reach net-zero emissions as rapidly as possible, Democrats commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035.”
To reach this goal, power plants, mines, oil and gas fields, and refineries would have to be prematurely mothballed, throwing out of work millions of high-paid, often union workers, and vast expanses of the country would have to be covered with a minimum of 60,000 new wind turbines, five million solar panels, and tens of thousands of miles of new power lines.
 
I guess the workers forced out of the coal mines, oil fields, and power plants might wind up stringing wires or installing solar panels, but destroying productive jobs that supply cheap, reliable energy for a set of lower-paying jobs to produce more-expensive, less-reliable energy seems like a bad trade to me, though the wealthy stockholders who would benefit from higher profits under this scheme will probably disagree.
 
The Biden-Sanders plan also targets homeowners and brick-and-mortar businesses, stating, 

[Democrats] will set a bold, national goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings by 2030, on the pathway to creating a 100 percent clean building sector. Within five years, we will … retrofit four million buildings, including helping local governments save money and cut pollution by weatherizing and upgrading energy systems in hospitals, schools, public housing, and municipal buildings. Democrats will encourage states and cities to adopt energy-efficient building codes … and leverage the federal footprint to model net-zero and 100 percent clean energy building solutions.

Whether they welcome it or not, homeowners and businesses would see federal agents or local building code inspectors come into their dwellings and offices to determine the buildings’ energy efficiency and require them to upgrade to meet new energy standards. Manufacturers would be forced to replace popular appliance models with a whole new series of appliances designed not to satisfy consumers’ demands for quality and effectiveness but to meet the government’s energy efficiency mandates. Under Biden, for example, people would have to say good-bye to their gas grills, gas stoves and ovens, gas dryers, water heaters, and air and heating systems. Manufacturers of the new, approved systems will be the ones to benefit.
 
I advise readers to remember President Barack Obama’s broken health-care promise that under Obamacare, “If you like your health care plan and doctor, you can keep them,” when Biden promises, “If you like your computer, doors, stove, windows, and water heater, you can keep them.”
 
The same is true for drivers. Biden would force people to replace their gasoline- and diesel-powered personal and commercial vehicles with more-expensive, less-reliable electric vehicles per government diktat, over a decade or so. The country’s entire transportation infrastructure would have to be remade too, with new charging stations replacing the ever-present gas stations along the nation’s streets and highways. People will have to tack on charging time to any trip they take of more than a couple hundred miles.
 
This may all sound like utopia to freedom-hating politicians, professors, and protesters, but it sounds like an authoritarian nightmare to me.

SOURCES: CFACT; Red State; Climate Change Weekly 330; Climate Change Weekly 313; American Thinker

This article first appeared Climate Change Weekly and is reprinted by permission.