Lights out, so says economist Stephen Moore in The New York Post, headlining:
President Biden just pledged to shut down 60% of America’s electric power
Moore writes:
“The Biden administration made two virtue-signaling proclamations at last week’s COP28 conference in Dubai that it says will help save the planet from climate change.
The policies aren’t likely to change the planet’s temperature by even one-tenth of a degree, but they might just destroy the 21st-century American industrial economy as we know it.
First, Team Biden announced it will stop production of all new coal plants in the United States.
This comes on the heels of President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency saying this year it would impose new power plant emission regulations that are virtually impossible for coal plants to comply with.
The bottom line: No more coal. Period.
But the White House was just getting started.
Vice President Kamala Harris trumpeted the next day new rules to “sharply reduce methane from the oil and natural gas industry.”
The administration calls methane a “super-pollutant” that it wants to eliminate because it’s “many times more potent than carbon dioxide.”
But methane is effectively a hydrocarbon that comes from natural gas. Eliminating methane is a de facto ban on natural gas power plants.
Here is the most sinister part of this story that no one in the Biden administration is telling you: Eradicating coal and natural gas plants will ravage America’s electric power capacity.
These regulations will cause rolling blackouts and brownouts across the country, much like we’ve already seen in California — America’s forerunner of radical anti-fossil fuel policies.
The lights will go out intermittently, and home heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer will have to be turned off or rationed.
Without gas and coal plants, hospitals, schools, the internet, construction projects and factories will be routinely shut down when unreliable alternative energy sources like wind and solar power aren’t delivering enough juice.
Upward of 60% of America’s electric power generation will go away — and soon.
Coal still provides roughly 20% of our electric power; natural gas supplies around 40%.
What will make up for this lost power, especially given that our demands on the power grid are only going to multiply over the coming years as the greens want the entire network of cars, trucks and vans to be powered by charging up on the electric grid?
The Biden administration, in other words, wants to nearly double the demands on the electric grid network at the same time it wants to shut down more than half of the nation’s power generation — and the most reliable sources at that.
Something must give.”