GOODER AND HARDER: Welcome To The Green New Deal, California.
Of course, I kid when I say that California is already experiencing the effects of the Green New Deal. A state that still derives more than 66 percent of its energy from non-renewable sources, has tens of trillions of dollars to go before it meets Joe Biden’s promise of reducing 65 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. The flooding of an already rickety grid with undependable renewables offers only a small taste of the “transition” to “clean energy.”
Because you can scaremonger about climate change all day long and ratchet it up to insane levels, but no one escapes the laws of physics or economics. California has been forced to extend the life of its last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon and gas-fired power plants to save the state from being plunged into darkness rather than the occasional blackout. As it turns out, most people are only theoretically fans of deindustrialization.
California is following in the footsteps of Germany, which over the past ten years closed down most of its nuclear power plants and engaged in a national decarbonization of the economy — energiewende. When reality hit, Germany, and thus the rest of the EU, was compelled to start relying heavily on Russian natural gas as it struggled to transition. Then Russia attacked Ukraine. Rather than falling back on its world-class, environmentally friendly, forward-looking nuclear-energy program, the Germans must now contemplate rationing and historically high prices. If they can avoid this fate, it will only be because the industry has turned back to coal.
Exit Quote: “Democrats are rigging the market to force you to buy a car that has a 200-mile reach and uses erratic and expensive energy when you already have increasingly efficient models in your driveway and tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore fossil fuels here at home — and much more around the world. We have centuries’ worth of the stuff waiting in the ground. Which gives us enough time to come up with some better ideas. Because, sorry, transitioning away from modernity and into windmills, choo-choo trains, folding fans, and candles isn’t progress, it’s regression. And California is leading the way.”