Rising gas prices have become yet another anchor weighing down President Joe Biden’s administration. Yet, everything the president said du...
Rising gas prices have become yet another anchor weighing down President Joe Biden’s administration. Yet, everything the president said during a Monday evening Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington ought to signal to American consumers that the White House is going to do nothing — absolutely nothing — to try to get them down.
Sure, Biden said they were going to get lower, but this is the same guy whose transportation secretary has claimed that the way to deal with high prices at the pump is simply to buy a pricey electric car.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t a particularly long address — 10 minutes, according to the transcript — there were plenty of things in the environment-centered speech that American drivers should approach with trepidation.
Steve Milloy — an attorney, former Donald Trump administration transition official, a current Fox News contributor and publisher of JunkScience.com — pointed out seven of them in a speech he called a “word salad with climate dressing.”
One of them was Biden’s claim that the administration is “going to cut costs for families — an average of $500 a year” by proposing “aggressive climate goals, tax credits to weatherize homes and businesses, doubling America’s solar, wind and — and other energy, lowering the price of electric vehicles, and — and much more.”
Milloy noted the absurdity of this notion if gas prices are high:
Right after that, Biden used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “another reason why we have to get off our dependency on fossil fuels.”
“Imagine where we’d be right now if, in fact, Europe was, in fact, energy-free of fossil fuels and was — we were in a situation where … it was all renewables,” Biden said. “It’d be a different world.”
Biden and those in his administration regularly use this construction — which I’ve taken to calling the John Lennon argument: “Imagine [fantastically unrealistic outcome of government spending]. Imagine [another highly improbable outcome]. Imagine [no possessions, I wonder if you can].”
Vice President Kamala Harris used it earlier this month at an event where she and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed electric vehicles.
“Imagine a future: The freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work; imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow — imagine that they produced zero emissions,” she said.
In this case, Milloy took Biden up on the proposition. Let’s imagine a situation where “Europe was, in fact, energy-free of fossil fuels.”
“Most of us would be dead, Joe,” Milloy said.
Touché.
Biden also noted he’s going to keep issuing executive orders on climate issues despite the fact many of these have run into judicial headwinds.
“The court has overruled me a couple of times,” Biden said. “But we created a climate office in the White House to carry out the whole-of-government effort to deal with climate.”
Milloy noted how problematic this sounded: “Sure the courts have ruled against me on climate, but I don’t care. Democracy!” he mocked.
These are fairly consequential decisions that Biden was referring to. In February, The Washington Post reported, a Louisiana federal judge blocked a Biden administration rule that would have used a higher estimate for the social cost of each gallon of “greenhouse gas” emissions in decision-making on fossil exploration on federal lands.
Later in the month, Reuters noted a majority on the Supreme Court “appeared skeptical of the federal government’s authority to issue sweeping regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants in a case that could undermine President Joe Biden’s plans to tackle climate change.
“The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority has shown wariness toward broad federal agency actions, was weighing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants under the landmark Clean Air Act,” the news service reported Feb. 28.
Another claim by the president was that electric vehicles would create new jobs in the auto industry.
“Ford, General Motors are making historic investments in electric vehicles. GM says they will be 100 percent electric vehicles by — maybe by 2035; Ford says, by 2030, 50 percent of all their vehicles,” Biden said.
“And this proves we can deal with climate and — crisis — and jobs. This creates a lot of jobs.”
Or, perhaps not:
As The Associated Press reported last year, “Factories will need fewer workers, mainly because electric vehicles contain 30% to 40% fewer moving parts than petroleum-run vehicles. In addition, many union jobs could shift to lower pay as automakers buy EV parts from supply companies or form separate ventures to build components.”
And then there was the odd, including Biden’s claim he’d “gone to almost every major climate crisis we’ve had in the last year and a half” and this bizarre sentence: “I mean, now — you know, when the hurricane hit in Louisiana, the 170-mile-an-hour winds — 79-mile-an-hour winds — more people died in Queens from flooding than they died in that hurricane.”
Milloy called that “word salad with climate dressing,” which could just as easily be applied to the rest of Biden’s address.
And that was the general problem with the speech, particularly considering the moment in which it was being given.
But for Biden, the real problem isn’t now — it’s for future generations.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has brought up the specter of global war — if not now then sometime in the not-too-distant future, given revanchists in both Moscow and Beijing. Neither Russia nor China wants the West to be energy independent.
But, according to Biden: “The climate crisis is the existential threat. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact. If we don’t keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius — no warmer than that — we’re going to have — our kids are going to — our grandchildren will never forgive us, and the world will change.”
So, to recap: Biden was wrong about lowering energy costs for families; deluded about fossil fuels; disdainful of the rule of law; wrong about job creation; incoherent on his response to weather crises; and, to cap it off, bizarrely wrong about the “existential threat” posed by supposed climate change versus the actual threat posed by belligerent geopolitical rivals of the United States.
No, Mr. President. The truly unforgivable act would be capitulating to Russia and China because your administration was too preoccupied with climate change to see the real existential threat.
Is that the world we want to leave for future generations?
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