by WorldTribune Staff, August 21, 2020
To implement his “green energy” plan, Joe Biden as president would not only raise taxes but would cut hundreds of thousands of fracking, mining, and quarrying jobs, analysts say.
Data from the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources shows that at least about one million American energy jobs would be eliminated. This includes 712,300 jobs in mining, quarrying, and natural gas extraction and another 116,500 jobs in petroleum and coal products manufacturing.
The “green energy” plan would also likely end U.S. energy independence, achieved during the Trump administration’s first term.
Related: Why the United States is back as energy leader, Dec. 6, 2018
Biden’s $2 trillion dollar green energy plan would require the electric grid to be relying solely on “clean” electricity by 2035.
“Overhauling the electric grid will drive up the cost of electricity and therefore hurt low- and middle-income consumers,” Robert Bryce, host of the Power Hungry Podcast, wrote for Forbes.
“$2 trillion is a lot of money and Biden plans to spend that sum in just four years. For reference, annual domestic electricity sales total about $400 billion per year. Thus, Biden’s plan calls for expenditures equal to five times the amount that consumers and industry are now spending annually on electricity,” Bryce wrote.
A pro-Trump super PAC ran a campaign add which noted that a Biden presidency would “kill up to 600,000 Pennsylvania jobs.”
Pennsylvania state Rep. Glenn Thompson, a Republican, said energy costs would spike under Biden’s plan and hurt manufacturing, the food supply chain and families’ checkbooks. Biden’s supporters are “driven by myth and by emotion,” he said.
“The cost of getting in your vehicle will be just unaffordable,” Thompson said. “You’ll have to stay at home, not because of the pandemic but because of Biden’s energy plan.”
Jim Kunz, business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 66 in Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month he was unconvinced Biden would support the natural gas industry. Other union officials have expressed similar concerns.
Biden’s plan would also require a massive construction buildup of wind and solar energy that would also be massively expensive. There are 29 states which require increasing quantities of their electricity to come from renewable sources, and a 2019 University of Chicago study found that these Renewable Portfolio Standards increased electricity costs by $125.2 billion in only seven years. Currently, wind and solar power make up just 9 percent of America’s electricity.
Biden has also said he would re-enter the Paris Climate Agreement which President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of in 2017.
In his June 1, 2017 remarks on the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement, Trump noted:
“Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025 according to the National Economic Research Associates. This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — not what we need — believe me, this is not what we need — including automobile jobs, and the further decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely. They rely for so much, and we would be giving them so little.
“According to this same study, by 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 percent; cement down 23 percent; iron and steel down 38 percent; coal — and I happen to love the coal miners — down 86 percent; natural gas down 31 percent. The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.”
Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney laid out in 2017 how the Paris Climate Accord will further gut working and middle class U.S. jobs in middle America: “The industrial carnage would have been concentrated on four states, according to the Chamber of Commerce study. Michigan’s GDP would shrink by 0.8 percent and employment would contract by 74,000 jobs. Missouri’s GDP would shrink by 1 percent. Ohio’s GDP would contract 1.2 percent. Pennsylvania’s GDP would decline by 1.8 percent and the state would lose 140,000 jobs.”
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