OPINION:
At Heartland’s 13th International Conference on Climate Change last week, everything became clear about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s cartoon understanding of the Green New Deal. Now that President Trump has succeeded in achieving not only energy independence for America, but energy dominance, she expects America to abandon fossil fuels.
America is now the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, and could be the world’s leading producer of coal as well, if President Obama and the Democrats had not tried so hard to bankrupt America’s coal industry. Low cost, abundant energy is essential for manufacturing, and good paying blue collar manufacturing jobs.
That is why manufacturing plants have already begun returning to America, along with rising wages for blue collar jobs, the foundation of Mr. Trump’s blue-collar boom. Mr. Trump’s energy dominance gives America a huge advantage over manufacturing in Germany and the rest of Europe, which has fallen for Green scaremongering, and a decisive advantage over Japan and East Asia.
The two policies that have produced Mr. Trump’s blue-collar boom are the tax reform/tax cuts and Mr. Trump’s deregulation, particularly in energy. Those are the policies that have produced the 6 million to 7 million new jobs, rising wages and the lowest unemployment in 50 years, the lowest ever in American history for blacks, Hispanics, Asians and youth.
Wages are growing fastest for lower income workers, reducing inequality, which Democratic rhetoric claims they support, but with exactly the opposite substantive results. This is why Mr. Trump’s economy is the most inclusive in American history, despite foolish, unsubstantiated claims of racism.
But these are exactly the two policies that Democrats are running on reversing. They say that they will reverse the Trump Republican tax cuts, which they do not remotely understand, and bring back Mr. Obama’s crushing energy regulation through the Green New Deal.
Those policies would throw America back into recession, with Mr. Obama’s record unemployment, and negligible economic growth. Gone would be Mr. Trump’s record low unemployment, rising wages and $12 trillion stock market boom.
And that doesn’t even count Democratic proposals for Medicare for All, paying off student loans, free college for all and reparations, along with the Green New Deal, which would increase spending by $94 trillion, more than all the economies of the world put together. Raising taxes and spending to 100 percent of GDP, that would be the outright communism and Marxism that Bernie Sanders has always favored throughout his political career. And Bernie is not alone in today’s Democratic Party.
Fossil fuels are associated with GDP growth, rising per capita income, increased life expectancy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution (birth of the modern world), and the electricity which fuels the Internet. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels makes plants grow, greening the Earth, already increasing agricultural output by $10 trillion. Fossil fuels are the source of at least 80 percent of energy in America and around the world, and that will continue for decades more, according to official U.S. government projections.
Modern economies cannot be powered by medieval windmills (they don’t call it the Dark Ages for nothing) and energy dancing on sunbeams. But advocates of the Green New Deal insist on zero net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That would require phasing out fossil fuels entirely, returning America to the agricultural economy of 1800, before the flowering of the industrial revolution, plowing the fields with oxen instead of tractors, and harvesting by hand. Forget the electricity needed to power the Interne, and cellphones.
But according to AOC, we will all be dead long before then. She insists without evidence that we only have 12 years left to live, if we don’t abandon our fossil fuel sins. But the scientific models used by the Environmental Protection Agency say that would only reduce global temperatures by 2100 by 0.083 to 0.17 degrees centigrade. That would be only about a tenth of a degree.
No wonder the economists who spoke last week at the Heartland Conference — from the American Enterprise Institute and elsewhere — estimated based on their economic models that would reduce average American incomes to $300 a month. That would mean increasing the poverty rate in America to 100 percent. Instead of eliminating global poverty, as we would on our current course, that would mean increasing poverty globally.
But that is not too much to pay to save the world from the dumb Trump Nazis, reverse America’s victory in the Cold War and hand the world over to the Democratic Communists.
• Peter J. Ferrara teaches economics at Kings College in New York and is a senior policy adviser to the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
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