FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Politico Exposed that the ‘Green New Deal’ Came from Obama

Feb. 22, 2018 (EIRNS)—In an article last month in Politico (“The Trouble with the ‘Green New Deal’ ”), Michael Grunwald explained that embedded in the Obama bad deal known as the “Stimulus Act” of 2009, was the prototype of the current scheme of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Ed Markey, et al.

While the current Congressional resolution is more openly lunatic (or “aspirational,” per Markey), and proposes to throw trillions of federal funds into solar fields and wind farms, Obama’s American Recovery and Reconstruction Act of 2009 doled out $90 billion for green initiatives in a manner much more targeted to produce Obama’s specialty, entropy. Considering the $800 billion “Stimulus” was one-third tax cuts and almost half transfer payments to rehire laid-off public employees, that $90 billion was most of what was claimed to be “infrastructure spending” in the act.

Grunwald wrote that that sum went into solar and wind electricity, renewable fuels, so-called “advanced batteries” to store and combine bits of green power, smart grids, energy-efficient homes, etc. It infamously financed the bankruptcy of a solar producer, Solyndra.

At the same time, Obama cancelled America’s advanced nuclear reactor development program at Argonne National Labs, and dismissed fusion power as a “fancy” technology that “we don’t need.”

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), the chair of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, says of Obama’s Stimulus, “It’s a road map for a Green New Deal.”

As EIR has reported, the “Green New Deal” is being disdained by Democrats who are not greenies—the latest being West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin in an interview Feb. 21.

It is also backfiring into a mounting number of calls for massive construction of nuclear power to gradually and realistically replace fossil fuel sources of electricity.

Prof. Larry Bell of the University of Houston, while attending the Feb. 16 Schiller Institute national conference, explained that fossil fuels actually produce about 98% of U.S. energy, and replacing them with wind and solar would not only cover America’s land area—it would require massive additions of natural gas (fossil fuel!) energy to back up the so-called renewables. On Jan. 11, in an adaptation of their new book American University Prof. Joshua Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist in the Wall Street Journal estimated that globally, replacing fossil fuel electricity production alone requires generating 100 trillion kwh of electricity per year from other sources. Only nuclear power can even be discussed in connection with such a goal, Goldstein says.