Biden’s Gang-Green Parading as ‘Infrastructure’ Invites Pro-Nuclear Opposition
April 11 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) may become means for mobilization of the global anti-Malthusian resistance—against the economy-destroying Green New Deal in the United States—although like other poles of that resistance, such as India, Russia and China, Manchin and Barrasso do not attack the bona fides of “sustainable development” or even climate hysteria. That will take other leaders and activists around the United States organized by The LaRouche Organization with its mass pamphlet “The Great Leap Backward.”
Manchin has become a focus of media attention for opposing abolition of the Senate filibuster—including writing an op-ed in the April 8 Washington Post supporting the filibuster—as well as opposing any further use of “budget reconciliation” tricks to pass Joe Biden’s $2.2 trillion mess of an “infrastructure and jobs” plan as legislation.
That plan, to the extent it is not simply a huge Keynesian money-printing and make-work “stimulus,” is aimed directly against coal and oil power and heat generation, as well as nuclear power, to replace all of them with the primitive throwback technologies wind, solar and biofuels “power” backed up by natural gas turbines. California and Texas have learned in the past year what disasters this can create economically; it can certainly destroy Manchin’s West Virginia union base and Barrasso’s Wyoming business constituency support. To add insult to grave injury, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted on “Fox News Sunday” today that this monster “infrastructure and jobs” plan is estimated to create, not 19 million as he claimed a week earlier, but 2.7 million new jobs over 8-9 years, or about 300,000/year. This is an almost under-the-radar rate, and a lot of them are to be jobs in homecare of elderly and disabled people and other non-infrastructural pursuits.
Manchin, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is for expanding American nuclear power production, and Barrasso, the Committee’s ranking member, was the sponsor of the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020. Manchin held hearings March 26 on the American nuclear power sector, at which he said, ““With the necessary policy and funding, we can maintain our nuclear supply chain, create high-paying manufacturing jobs, and reassert that U.S. leadership” in nuclear power. The key word was “funding”: Barrasso’s Nuclear Infrastructure Act was primarily aimed at more supportive regulation for progress of advanced reactor designs, and had funding only for subsidies to extend the operating life of existing U.S. reactors, and to clean up uranium mining sites on tribal lands.
Both Senators bowed to the obligatory slave-motivations for developing the U.S. nuclear industry: preventing climate change, and opposing Russian and Chinese world leadership in nuclear.
They will have to be kicked in their rears by American elected officials and organizations to promote the real needs for nuclear power, desalination, process heat, and propulsion; and to grab for some of that funding to build nuclear and exercise nuclear leadership in developing countries.
