You Won't Believe Who's Giving Up on Green Energy

Green energy is the pipe-dream of coastal elitists, billion-dollar grifters, Big Government idolizers, idle urbanites, and just plain malinformed people who think electricity comes out of the wall.

But one of those coastal elites has finally had enough, saying now that “U.S. energy policy today has to be the arsenal of democracy” and the “engine of economic growth” that will some day make possible a “transition to a low-carbon economy.”

It only took seven months of brutal warfare financed by Russian oil profits made possible by Presidentish Joe Biden’s war on domestic energy production, but Thomas Friedman has joined Donald Trump and Sarah Palin in the “Drill, Baby, Drill!” fan club.

And Friedman did it on the opinion page of the Left’s Holy of Holies: The opinion page of the The New York Times.

Can you fracking believe it?

You remember Thomas Friedman, don’t you? He’s the author and New York Times columnist who once admitted longing for Beijing-style authoritarianism right here at home.

“What if we could just be China for a day?” Friedman pondered on Meet the Press in 2010. “You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.”

China is big on clean energy, or at least purports to be. Electric vehicles actually make a lot of sense for a country with literally hundreds of millions of people tightly crammed into coastal urban megalopolises. (Shouldn’t that be “megalopoli?” Anyway, SpellCheck disagrees.)

On the other hand, China is happy to pollute like mad, making and selling us the endless solar panels demanded by our green energy overlords.

That’s why I was actually shocked at just how reality-based Friedman sounds here:

The most important factor for quickly expanding our exploitation of oil, gas, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro or nuclear energy is giving the companies that pursue them (and the banks that fund them) the regulatory certainty that if they invest billions, the government will help them to quickly build the transmission lines and pipelines to get their energy to market.

Greens love solar panels but hate transmission lines. Good luck saving the planet with that approach.

Deregulation? Telling the green energy fanatics to take a hike? Where’s this Thomas Friedman been all my life?

To be fair, Friedman still wants that green energy future — he’s just willing to postpone it. And he acts as though permitting drilling and fracking will somehow be a win for Biden and a way to stick it to Republicans.

But this is where I remember my favorite personal maxim: Never interrupt someone when they’re busy talking themselves into your position.

Welcome aboard, Tom. Let’s get fracking.