https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/10/16/bidens-attack-on-electricity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third
Lights out
Marxism had many trappings of a religion. But fortunately, its major claims were of this world and could be falsified. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, the living conditions of workers deteriorate and that only by seizing the means of production can they improve their lot. After a few generations of communism, nobody in Europe believed that anymore.
The climate-change movement has a similar vulnerability. Its religious trappings are plain enough: the attribution of natural catastrophes to human wickedness, revelations of the apocalypse, persecution of heretics. But at the end of the day its claims are material — and falsifiable.
With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses. It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change.
Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet. In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid. The first was vehicle-emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now. The second would require the large natural-gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.
Both rules rest on thin legal ice. For the vehicles rule, the EPA is defining each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it. As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates. Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand. The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.
