Green Infrastructure: Pass It and Then We’ll See What’s in It; Congress, Don’t Let Liberals Shoehorn Harmful Energy Policies Into Budget and Infrastructure Bills, and related stories

By admin On Jul 23, 2021

Green Infrastructure: Pass It and Then We’ll See What’s in It:

The modern Beltway Republican Party deserves a healthy measure of blame for our arrival at the cusp of massively destructive climate-policy implementation.

With the August recess imminent, the congressional Democrats are desperate to spend huge sums of other people’s money, and “infrastructure” is as useful a rhetorical vehicle for that purpose as any. With their innumerable constituencies’ long wish lists hardly a secret, an infinitely elastic definition of “infrastructure” is a virtue born of necessity, one manifestation of which, simultaneously amusing and revealing, is the proposed “infrastructure” expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing coverage. This “infrastructure” sleight of hand applies a fortiori to the “green” demands of environmentalist pressure groups; after all, “infrastructure” traditionally means roads, bridges, airports, water projects, and other such public investments in physical capital assets almost always opposed by left-wing environmentalists.

I shunt aside here the deeply dubious “crisis” description of the physical state of U.S. public infrastructure, and the issue of whether such investments ought primarily to be a federal or state/local responsibility. Suffice it to say that traditional infrastructure spending is classic political pork, the benefits of which are substantially local while the costs are spread across current and future taxpayers writ large. Nor is it necessary to delineate the division of such green provisions between the “bipartisan” $1.2 trillion (of which $579 billion is new spending) bill to be passed with 60-plus votes in the Senate, and the $3.5 trillion (at last count) “reconciliation” bill intended to be passed with 50 Democratic votes, plus the tiebreaker from Vice President Harris. (Note that these dollar figures almost certainly are underestimates driven by assumptions ranging from dubious to dishonest.) What is fascinating is that the dollar figures have been delineated by the various politicians and reported by the journalists with great specificity, while the “green” provisions themselves are a mystery. No one — not the drafters of the bill, not the negotiators, not the congressional leadership, not the Biden administration — knows what those provisions are or will be, or what they will cost, after the sausage machine is done grinding and then departs the Beltway.

But we do know that the climate left is a sizeable dimension of the Democratic coalition vociferous, unappeasable, utterly ideological and anti-human in its opposition to fossil fuels — an opposition that has virtually nothing to do with the “environment” — and invincible in its ignorance. And so it is no accident, as Pravda used to put it, that the climate imperative — opposition to fossil fuels — is the central thrust of the forthcoming “green” provisions of the infrastructure legislation, even given the enormous black box that for now prevents a detailed examination of those proposals. —>READ MORE HERE

Congress, Don’t Let Liberals Shoehorn Harmful Energy Policies Into Budget and Infrastructure Bills:

President Joe Biden has made it the policy of his administration to decarbonize the electricity sector fully by 2035 and to reach economy-wide net zero emissions by 2050.

The trouble is, it’s very hard for a president to unilaterally require hundreds of millions of American businesses, industries, and energy users to comply without a law from Congress or running afoul of the Supreme Court (pesky checks and balances!).

While the Biden administration frequently refers to these as “our target,” the peoples’ representatives in Congress haven’t yet obliged. And for good reason—the president’s target promises to totally redefine the economy and presumes that producing and using energy is something the government should own or manage instead of the freewill exchange between businesses and customers who have unique needs, preferences, and choices.

Enter liberal Democrats who are trying to push the president’s climate policies through a rushed process of self-imposed crisis to pass a $3.5 trillion budget package riding on the good graces of a tenuously bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The main tools being considered are a clean electricity standard and a carbon border adjustment tax.