Bernie’s Green Leap Forward Cost: $16 trillion. Fracking: banned. Oil CEOs: in jail.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernies-green-leap-forward-11566761328
Bernie Sanders published his version of the Green New Deal last week, and it’s written with all the realism voters have come to expect. Start with its price: “an historic $16.3 trillion.” That’s 10 times Joe Biden ’s climate plan, which is wild already. For the record, America’s annual economy is about $21 trillion.
Mr. Sanders says climate change “shares similarities with the crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s,” when the U.S. “within three short years restructured the entire economy.” Oh, the good old days of coffee and meat rationing. Maybe that isn’t what Mr. Sanders has in mind, but he pledges to declare a national emergency and push through “a wholesale transformation of our society.”
To start, he’d switch electricity and transportation to 100% renewables by 2030. He would ban fracking; ban drilling offshore and on federal lands; ban “imports and exports of fossil fuels”; cancel oil pipelines already being built; and halt permitting of “new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure.”
Nuclear power would be phased out. He calls it a “false solution,” along with geoengineering and carbon capture. And don’t worry about rising costs. “We do not expect energy prices to spike,” he says, “because the federal government is going to weatherize homes, electrify heating, and keep electricity prices stable.” Thanks to the public provision of renewables, “after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.”
Mr. Sanders will make railroads retrofit their “coal and oil bomb trains.” He says that fossil-fuel companies, driven by “greed,” have “evaded taxes, desecrated tribal lands, exploited workers and poisoned communities.” He believes this amounts to “criminal activity,” and as President he would tell his Justice Department to pursue it “just as the federal government did with the tobacco industry.”
To keep the rest of business in line, the Treasury and the Environmental Protection Agency would “monitor investments and actions made around the globe.” That way the feds could “impose sanctions on corporations and entities that threaten national and global emissions reduction goals.”
Workers in the fossil-fuel industry would be given a “just transition,” including “five years of a wage guarantee,” “a four-year college education” if they so desire, plus “early retirement support for those who choose it.” But in case you do want to work, Mr. Sanders says his plan will be “ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs.”
As long as Bernie is ending things: War, huh, what is it good for? He’d “lead the planet in a wholesale shift away from militarism.” After collecting the last Nobel Peace Prize ever required, he would redirect the trillions of dollars now spent on “misguided wars and weapons of mass destruction” toward climate change.
Let’s not ignore the many spending line-items in Mr. Sanders’s agenda:
• $2.2 trillion to help small businesses and families in “weatherizing and retrofitting.”
• $2.1 trillion to help companies and families “trade in their fossil fuel-dependent vehicles for new electric vehicles.”
• $607 billion for a “regional high-speed rail system.”
• $527 billion to offer “free, universal school meals,” as well as to expand food stamps. This is part of his Green New Deal “because the cost of energy and food are so intertwined.”
• $407 billion to “replace all school and transit buses with electric buses.”
• $216 billion for truckers to “replace all diesel tractor trailer trucks.”
• $36 billion to help people “transform their lawns into food-producing or reforested spaces.”
At some point the eyes glaze over. Yet there’s much more, from spending on broadband internet to money for “farmers of color.” Bernie’s plan, at least on our office printer, runs to 37 pages. (Sorry, trees.)
The virtue of all this for Democratic voters is that it shows what Bernie’s Manichaean socialism would entail as he unleashes the federal government to fine-tune every aspect of American life. Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion climate plan is a fever dream. Mr. Sanders makes him look almost reasonable.
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