Welcome to a special Memorial Day edition of the Afternoon TEA.
Did you know?
When American voters are asked: “Is a clean environment important to you?” just about everyone replies yes. However, this overwhelming majority quickly becomes a small minority when asked if they are willing to pay substantially more for electricity, gasoline, other utilities, and taxes, in order to subsidize so-called intermittent power sources such as wind and solar, and provide tax subsidies for expensive electric vehicles. Additionally, nearly 70% of American voters favor American energy independence over bans on domestic natural gas exploration because they understand the extremely high costs of dependency on foreign nations for oil, like never-ending wars. The Empowerment Alliance’s interactions with hundreds of thousands of Americans has shown that most Americans understand it’s possible to have both a clean environment and national energy security through American production of clean-burning natural gas and oil.
“Since 1970, implementation of the Clean Air Act and technological advances from American innovators have dramatically improved air quality in the U.S. Since that time, the combined emissions of criteria and precursor pollutants have dropped by 77%.”
Do you know who would be the happiest folks on the planet if we actually adopted the Green New Deal? The heads of government in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and other OPEC nations, that’s who! We would be playing right back into the foreign-dependency trap, doing virtually nothing to preserve or achieve a clean environment, and enriching foreign nations while impoverishing our own. The Shale Revolution, beginning around 2007, gave America the incredible, long-term opportunity to achieve energy independence—meaning we would no longer depend on any foreign nation for natural gas or oil production. The reality is that nearly half the homes in the U.S. are heated with natural gas, 40% of the electricity is generated by natural gas, and the vast majority of existing vehicles in America today are powered by petroleum products. The actual likelihood of replacing all that with intermittent energy like wind and solar is nearly impossible.
What plans like the Green New Deal don’t contemplate is how we would dispose of the millions of spent batteries, the millions of spent solar panels, the hulking carcasses of defunct wind turbines, where we would source the “rare earths” and lithium now almost entirely controlled by China to manufacture this imagined electric vehicle fleet, how we would pay for this so-called green energy to replace our current reliable and clean-burning natural gas power plants, what would be the power source to back up the intermittent power produced by wind and solar arrays since the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Indeed, renewables now only power 20 percent of the U.S.’s electricity-not the 100% we have come to expect when we turn on our lights and computers, raise the garage door, turn up the thermostat, open the refrigerator and recharge all our devices every day! That electricity is produced by natural gas, nuclear, coal, and hydro-power. Most people don’t realize that every single solar and wind installation requires some other source of power as back-up, such as natural gas, nuclear or coal, in order to provide 100% electrical power availability. Actually, executing the Green New Deal would bankrupt the nation with no gain for the environment whatsoever.
If we Americans are truly concerned about protecting the global environment, then we will encourage the real polluters of the world—like China and India which are still building hundreds of “un-scrubbed” coal plants– to transition to domestically sourced clean-burning natural gas or zero-carbon emissions nuclear. We would be helping the 3.5 billion people worldwide who currently little to no access to electricity to develop their own domestic natural gas resources and infrastructure. Watch the video below for a deep dive into energy poverty around the world.
Before we go…
On this Memorial Day, 2021, we honor and salute the Americans who gave their lives in defense of this great nation, from its founding to today. We also remember the first responders who ran toward danger to save and protect other Americans. May God bless them for their sacrifice, and may He also bless America, the land of the free and the home of the brave!
