"I would transition away from the oil industry, yes."
"It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time."
"I'd stop giving to the oil industry, I'd stop giving them federal subsidies."
"We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025."
"The point is, look, we have to move toward a net-zero emissions. The first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production, by 2050 totally."
Biden's energy plan does not literally call for shutting down the entire oil and gas and coal industries by 2025. It calls for zero-emissions with a fantasy that one will develop a huge industry that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The cost of actually sucking carbon dioxide, plant food, from the atmosphere will be gigantic. It will have a huge negative impact on farming as well. The materials that will hold the carbon dioxide will have to be mined at great cost, or great caverns will have to be created to hold the removed carbon dioxide. The sequestration of carbon dioxide will have major environmental costs itself.
How will the otherworldly costs of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere be borne? If it is to be borne by the American taxpayer, that would be a subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industries, in the left's viewpoint. Since Biden pledges no subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries, they will have to pay the incredible costs for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This will cause the costs of oil, gas, and coal to skyrocket. Skyrocketing costs means much lower usage of oil, gas, and coal. This means many, many oil, gas, and coal workers will become unemployed. It means that many people who transport oil, gas, coal, and products made from them will become unemployed. Those towns and cities which presently support these industries will have massive unemployment. As West Virginia has suffered greatly from the travails of coal under prohibitive governmental mandated expenses, so will many other areas be devastated. Western Pennsylvania, eastern and southern Ohio, North Dakota, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana will be very hard hit.
All of this is to happen in a crash manner by 2025, according to what Biden said in the debate. Some say he was confused and meant to say by 2035, the date he gave for zero-emissions in energy production. Maybe he was confused and careless. Maybe the differing dates are because the huge changes in energy production to create tens of thousands of wind generators, huge photovoltaic farms, bank after bank of batteries, and the means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in massive quantities will cause the generation of a huge load of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Making cement blocks huge enough to anchor those wind generators releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for instance. Mining the materials for huge, sweeping banks of batteries, for the materials to make wind generators, and to make photovoltaic farms requires an incredible amount of energy use. So, maybe Biden is saying the oil, gas, and coal industries must be zero-emissions by 2025, but the totally changed energy industry as a whole will not have to be zero-emissions until 2035. That would make sense, if the U.S. economy could survive such wrenching changes in a 14 year period. But it cannot do so. Trump is right that this would cause our economy to falter badly. We would be in for a never-ending depression.
Stop and think about the consequences of skyrocketing energy costs. All of our transportation costs will go up greatly. Manufacturing operations require considerable energy and they require that it be dependable. A power outage can destroy all of the materials or products in a production process at the time of power failure. A laboratory, such as mine, can lose many hours of time when an analysis process is stopped in mid-stream and a unique sample is destroyed. The cost of virtually every product must go up as its production cost goes up and the transportation cost to get it to the customer goes up. One of the reasons Americans have higher incomes than the vast majority of people around the world is because we have a lower cost of energy and a more dependable supply of energy than almost any other country. Under Biden's energy plan, manufacturers will have no choice but to move many manufacturing and support jobs out of the U.S. That situation will be even worse than it was under the Obama/Biden administration. When manufacturing goes overseas, the support technology also goes overseas. Engineering and science jobs in support of manufacturing disappear, along with the knowledge to make things. The U.S. will lose the knowledge that has given us the very superior standard of living we have.
As I have shown in many posts on this blog, the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis has been proven to be wrong. The Earth energy budgets that summarize the understanding of the so-called consensus violate physics. The climate models based on their wrong ideas of physics, keep making wrong predictions about the temperatures in the atmosphere and about future temperatures. Of course they do, because they do not understand the physics of thermal radiation, convection in air, and they even violate energy conservation. Even if one does not understand the physics, as very few people do, the scientific method says the hypothesis is wrong because the model predictions have been wrong.
Of course the insanity of the Biden energy plan does not stand alone among his insane policy ideas. Biden will hit the American economy with a slew of new regulations with a massive expansion of the Swamp Creature regulatory state. Regulations are a huge expense burden on business already. Small businesses cannot even know what the regulations are because they do not have the means to monitor the avalanche of new regulations and interpretations of regulations that occur each year. Businesses that want to make large investments are afraid to do so, because the new operations they want to create may take years to be in place (in large part due to regulations) and then take years to make back their initial investment. What arbitrary, irrationally expensive regulations relative to any benefits will come down the pike and wipe out their investment? Politicians rarely think about the consequences of their actions, except as far as the next election at most. A lifetime politician like Biden is not even capable of thinking about the destructive nature of his ideas. The actions President Trump has taken to moderate the burdens of federal regulations are a much under-esteemed effect of his administration.
Another idiot's delight is a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, which was backed by Biden in the debate and has widespread support in the Democratic Party. As I have previously written on this blog, the cost of living in the U.S. varies hugely across the country. A business in NYC or one in San Francisco is much more likely to be able to justify paying an employee $15 an hour than is a small business in Okmulgee, Oklahoma or Arco, Idaho or Rising Sun, Mississippi. The $15/hour Biden plan is a way to depopulate rural America and to force everyone into huge metropolitan areas where the cost of living is much higher, but one can also often earn more money. Unfortunately, this actually tends to result in a real lowering of the standard of living of many people, especially the very poorer people that the $15/hour proposal pretends to help. The resident of NYC with a mean income earns less real income than does the mean income earning American when you correct for the higher cost of living! For a person of mean income, moving from Oklahoma to NYC actually lowers your standard of living, despite the fact you will likely be paid more.
President Trump understands the basic principles that allow our economy to flourish and that allow Americans to enjoy an increasing standard of living. Joe Biden does not.
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