“I suppose my main objection is the effective elimination of 80% of the world’s energy would likely eliminate 80% of the world’s people in the end. I mean, just growing food, for example—how would we grow food for the world’s people without tractors and trucks, and all of the other machinery that is required to deliver food, especially to the inner cities of large centers like Moscow, Shanghai and New York City? How would we get the food to the stores? It’s symptomatic of the fact that people who live in cities just take it for granted that this food appears there for them in supermarkets in great variety, healthy food to keep them alive when they couldn’t possibly grow it for themselves with such dense populations. And if, in fact, fossil fuels were banned, agricultural productivity would fall dramatically and people would starve by the millions. So, that is just a little bit of why I think it’s a ridiculous proposal....
“I think a lot of people are out of touch in modern society. As I said, people just take it for granted [that] ... food production and the production of all of our civilization’s needs, especially the big infrastructure of our cities and all of the transportation systems all require a tremendous amount of energy, both in their construction and in their operation. Between buildings and transportation, this amounts to at least 75% of all the energy that is used in the world, particularly for transportation.
“More than 90% of all transportation is based on fossil fuels, particularly petroleum or oil, and oil is, indeed, the largest amount of energy of any single source that we use in our daily lives. So, people need to educate themselves about these things because if they are taken in by this Green New Deal.... The truth is, AOC is not behind this, she is the front person for it, she is very attractive, she’s fairly well-spoken, but she doesn’t know anything about these subjects in particular, she was a bartender before she became a member of Congress.... [T]his is not her idea alone, she is just the front person speaking on behalf of this crazy idea.”
