On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed two executive orders and issued a memorandum pushing the climate alarmist narrative and boosting the climate-industrial complex. Biden claimed that his administration’s climate boondoggle will create more jobs, but his first climate move — nixing the Keystone XL pipeline — cost 1,000 jobs right away, and an estimated 10,000 more. His climate orders will upend America’s national security as well as its economy.
“Today is ‘climate day’ at the White House, which means that today is ‘jobs day’ at the White House,” Biden said as he introduced his new climate agenda. The president repeated the canard that his transition to green technologies would create more jobs than it eliminates, without mentioning that creating this climate-industrial complex requires massive amounts of taxpayer money and more government intrusion into the economy.
Naturally, vocal criticism came quickly.
“The president who fancies himself as ‘Blue-Collar Joe’ will kill tens of thousands of high-paying blue-collar jobs with his ban on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands,” former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member Steve Milloy said in a statement. “Average oil and gas industry workers earn $70,000 to $80,000 per year vs. $40,000 to $60,000 in the wind and solar energies. The oil and gas jobs killed will be replaced by unemployment and/or lesser paying jobs.”
“Killing oil and gas industry jobs will accomplish nothing for the climate or environment. It will just make energy more expensive, reduce our standard of living and harm our national security by making us more dependent on OPEC,” Milloy argued.
“President Biden is committed to destroying the natural gas and oil industry, and he isn’t wasting any time,” Daniel Turner, executive director of Power the Future, said in a statement. “Elections have consequences and halting fossil fuel leasing on federal lands will cost America good-paying jobs and much-needed revenue, in addition to squandering the energy independence that President Trump fought so hard to achieve.”
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While Biden only signed two executive orders, his first order, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad Executive Order,” proved a monstrosity with no fewer than seven separate aspects.
The order directs the federal government to place the so-called “climate crisis” at the center of U.S. foreign policy and national security concerns. This involves: committing the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement; scheduling a Leaders’ Climate Summit on Earth Day, April 22, 2021; creating a new climate envoy (John Kerry) for the National Security Council; and directing the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a report on climate change. All that represents just one-seventh of this executive monstrosity.
This executive order also established a new climate policy office and a new National Climate Task Force in an effort to create a “whole-of-government approach” to the supposed “climate crisis.” That effort includes a climate focus in Biden’s economic plan, directing federal agencies to transition to zero-emission vehicles and hire union workers, updating facilities to make them resilient to the supposed climate crisis, blocking new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, and stopping all fossil fuel subsidies.
The order directs federal infrastructure programs to use green energy and creates a new Civilian Climate Corps to put Americans to work restoring public lands and waters. It creates a new federal bureaucracy to reach out to “coal, oil and natural gas, and power plant communities,” which will advance projects to reduce emissions and clean up abandoned infrastructure.
Finally, the order creates a new “Environmental Justice Interagency Council” to “prioritize environmental justice” and ensure that 40 percent of federal investments help “disadvantaged communities.”
Yes, this is all part of one executive order.
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In addition to all this, Biden signed an executive order establishing the “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology” and a memorandum on scientific integrity. The scientific integrity memo directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy director to ensure scientific integrity across federal agencies, likely rooting out any disagreement on climate alarmism.
These executive actions will weaken America’s energy industry, making the country more reliant on foreign imports of oil and gas. This may undermine some of former President Donald Trump’s progress in the Middle East and weaken America’s position on the world stage. Also, green energy requires rare-earth minerals, a market China has dominated.
Yet the worst aspect of all this is that the entire edifice is built on a lie.
During his speech announcing the new orders, Biden mentioned recent natural disasters, suggesting that burning fossil fuels is the key cause behind all worsening of extreme weather events, other contributing factors be damned. Those who disagree are “deniers” of “science.” Nevermind the fact that claims of a climate change “consensus” are misleading and overblown, or the facts that climate alarmist predictions have proven wrong time and time again for 50 years.
Biden referenced wildfires in California. Yet such wildfires are nothing new in California — like they are nothing new in my native Colorado. I grew up in the dry mountains and spent my summers cleaning up the forest floor to prevent wildfires. This mitigation is tough and thankless work, but it is necessary to prevent wildfires. The tragic spate of wildfires in California comes as the state has failed to carry out the controlled burns and other cleaning efforts that keep fast-spreading fires at bay. Improper forest management, not the burning of fossil fuels, is the key culprit.
Biden also mentioned worsening floods in the Midwest and hurricanes on the East Coast as the result of the “climate crisis.”
Floods and hurricanes have quite familiar to these regions of the country, however, for thousands of years. Although the Midwest did experience devastating floods last year, floods in that area are not exactly new. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, and it came only a few decades after the invention of the automobile.
Joe Biden Promises Fewer Fires, Floods, and Hurricanes if He Wins in November
As for hurricanes, many peer-reviewed studies have disputed the notion that carbon emissions make hurricanes worse. Yet Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) suggested that “there were no hurricanes” hitting New York before the devastating impacts of climate change. Yet analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 to 1438, long before the internal combustion engine.
Biden’s executive orders may cut down on carbon emissions somewhat, but they won’t stave off natural disasters. They will certainly cost American taxpayers a boatload, make business more difficult, and create even more administrative bloat in the federal government.
These policies will also enrich financiers in the climate-industrial complex, redirecting public and private dollars toward green boondoggles like the notoriously corrupt energy company Solyndra. In his speech on Wednesday, Biden took credit for directing green energy grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Solyndra lied to the Department of Energy to secure $535 million of those funds. In a way, Biden took credit for one of the Obama administration’s biggest scandals.
Thanks to Biden’s new executive orders — and a raft of legislation that is likely to work its way through Congress in the next two years — the Biden administration seems primed for more Solyndras.
Biden has only been in office for a week. It’s going to be a long four years.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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