Stephen Moore writes for the New York Post about the implications of a new Biden administration pronouncement.
The Biden administration made two virtue-signaling proclamations at last week’s COP28 conference in Dubai it says will help save the planet from climate change.
The policies aren’t likely to change the planet’s temperature by even one-tenth of a degree, but they might just destroy the 21st-century American industrial economy as we know it.
First, Team Biden announced it will stop production of all new coal plants in the United States.
This comes on the heels of President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency saying this year it would impose new power-plant emission regulations that are virtually impossible for coal plants to comply with.
The bottom line: no more coal. Period.
But the White House was just getting started.
Vice President Kamala Harris trumpeted the next day new rules to “sharply reduce methane from the oil and natural gas industry.”
The administration calls methane a “super-pollutant” it wants to eliminate because it’s “many times more potent than carbon dioxide.”
But methane is effectively a hydrocarbon that comes from natural gas.
Eliminating methane is a de facto ban on natural-gas power plants.
Here is the most sinister part of this story no one in the Biden administration is telling you: Eradicating coal and natural-gas plants will ravage America’s electric-power capacity.
These regulations will cause rolling blackouts and brownouts across the country, much like we’ve already seen in California — America’s forerunner of radical anti-fossil fuel policies.
The lights will go out intermittently, and home heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer will have to be turned off or rationed.
Without gas and coal plants, hospitals, schools, the Internet, construction projects and factories will be routinely shut down when unreliable alternative-energy sources like wind and solar power aren’t delivering enough juice.
Upward of 60% of America’s electric-power generation will go away — and soon.
Coal still provides roughly 20% of our electric power; natural gas supplies around 40%.