Today's Wall St. Journal has an article summarizing a study by the Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University on where the announced investments in the Left's energy policy are to be made. The Atlas Public Policy group is strongly in favor of the Left's "green" energy policies and is not an Ayn Rand-inspired effort. Companies plan to spend $170 billion on projects in response and supposedly create 200,000 new industrial jobs. Most of these projects and jobs are to be in Republican states. New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico will get a decent share among the Democrat states, but mostly the investment will go to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The battleground states of Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan get a great share of the investment money. The top investment states from most to less are: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Arizona. Not one of these states is a solid Democrat state.
The announced projects are to make car batteries, electric vehicles, low-emission buses, solar equipment, electrical grid supplies, wind turbines, recycling, mine for critical materials, hydrogen electrolyzers, and carbon dioxide sequestration. Companies are choosing to make most of their investments in Republican states because of lower labor and living costs, lower taxes, more dependable and affordable supplies of electricity, and fewer restrictions on land use.
Republicans and the residents of these states should not rejoice in this investment overmuch. Most of the investment is malinvestment. It is not in response to real human need and enrichment. It is mostly built upon the fable that oil, gas, and coal use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming. That hypothesis has failed scientifically, though it has become powerful in building special interest groups. More and more people are having doubts about it. In fact, the most reliable data we have in the USA on the direction of the temperature change is that we are in a very moderate cooling stage since 1895. I am referring to the rural weather station data before it is manipulated into a false substantial warming trend, as explained in my article The Fake Climate Record using data provided by Tony Heller.
Many of these projects are going to fail. The money invested in them will be lost. The people hired will learn skills for which there will be no market when they lose their jobs. People will own homes they cannot afford to leave because they cannot sell them in the ghost town that will be left behind when the bubble of "green" energy bursts. Schools and the many service and goods-selling businesses built to serve the workers on these wet-sand projects will be sunk and abandoned. There will be many a tragedy. Much of the investment money would otherwise have gone to the same areas to perform productive work. The people who took dead-end jobs could have taken jobs that were fulfilling real needs and wants. Many good Republicans will be left holding the bag. The Democrats will just tell them coldly to study computer coding as Hilary told the West Virginia coal miners to do.
Before the Progressives can transform America, they must destroy America. Sowing chaos and creating a state of nihilism is their thing. Destroying our private sector affordable and reliable energy supply is essential for making Americans more dependent upon government and more willing to do as they are told by their elitist betters. In many ways, those elitists will take us back to the Middle Ages so they can exercise unquestioned authority. In their ideal world, the politicians will be the aristocracy and the bureaucrats will be the clerics of the church. The rest of us will be serfs.
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