Bernie’s Climate Honesty The Senator’s energy plan shows where Democrats want to go.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bernies-climate-honesty-1449619602
Bernie Sanders has no chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but the breathtaking details of the climate-change plan he released this week are still worth noting. They show where the Democratic Party is headed.
The Vermont Senator calls climate change “the single greatest threat facing our planet,” and he seems to mean it. He is proposing a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, and an 80% reduction by 2050, which is significantly more than the up-to 28% cut by 2025 that President Obama has pledged at the Paris climate confab.
To reach this developing world level of CO2 emissions, Mr. Sanders would: impose an unspecified carbon tax; ban all offshore drilling and fossil-fuel leases on federal lands; stop “dirty pipeline” projects; ban natural gas and oil exports; force states to ban fracking; ban mountaintop coal mining; impose a new fuel-efficiency standard of 65 miles per gallon by 2025; spend “massive” federal dollars on subsidies for wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, home-efficiency programs and energy storage; federally underwrite electric-car charging stations, high-speed passenger and cargo rail, a smart grid, and clean-energy job training; shut down the nuclear industry; and provide “clean energy funding” to the rest of the world.
Mr. Sanders doesn’t include the cost of all this, for obvious political reasons, yet give him points for honesty. Hillary Clinton wants voters to believe that Planet Earth can be cooled with this rule change or that subsidy tweak. The Sanders plan admits that decarbonization under current technology will require a government-mandated top-to-bottom remake of the U.S. economy, and maybe the American way of life. Welcome to the revolution.
Comments are closed.
