A Green Nightmare
By Sen. John Thune
By now you’ve probably heard about the Democrats’ “Green New Deal,” a left-wing smorgasbord of government-knows-best policies that, if enacted, would have a massive effect on the U.S. economy and hit family budgets in states across the country. For American families, it would essentially mean higher taxes, higher energy costs, and less control over their own choices.
What is the Democrats’ desired outcome with the Green New Deal, you might ask? Great question. Among their goals is to eliminate all fossil fuels – not just from your car, but your home, the trucks that deliver food to your local grocery store, and the airplanes that get you to and from your vacation destination. All in just ten years, at that.
The Green New Deal mandates “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.” I’d note that “all existing buildings” would include your house, your kids’ school, your place of worship,and your office or place of business.
Some of their proposals will sound familiar. South Dakotans might remember reading headlines like these in their local paper a decade ago: “Farmers, ranchers worry EPA has cow, pig ‘sin tax’ in store,” “Livestock emissions may cost ranchers,” or “Thune looking to defeat ‘cow tax,’” among others. That’s right, the principles of this once-defeated and highly illogical idea that would penalize farmers and ranchers who own flatulent cows (yes, really) are back again.
South Dakotans are smart people, so they know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So when Democrats talk about socialist fantasies like the Green New Deal, they know someone has to pay for them. In this case, the Democrats’ suggestion that you rid yourself of gasoline vehicles and retrofit your home with solar panels is an expense that would fall not to the government officials who’ve come up with these ideas, but to you the taxpayer.
The Green New Deal isn’t cheap either. The price tag for implementing it is estimated to cost – you might want to sit down for this – as much as $93 trillion over just 10 years. To put that into perspective, $93 trillion is more money than the federal government has ever spent. And I don’t mean more than it’s spent in one year or 10 years or even 100 years, I mean in the history of the United States.
As an example of just how absurd that is, if the government took every family that makes more than $200,000 and taxed them at 100 percent for 10 years – taking every penny they earned – Democrats still wouldn’t have enough money to pay for their green dream, which is actually more like a green nightmare. That means the enormous burden of covering the cost of this plan would fall on nearly every single American.
Confronted with some of these realities, plus political blowback, Democrats are starting to back away from their Green New Deal. Some are even trying to claim that voting on it – their own proposal – which is something Republicans, who would oppose it, are willing to accommodate, would be nothing more than a political show vote. I know, how is voting on something you support a show vote? I don’t know either.
At the end of the day, count me as someone who believes human activity has some degree of an effect on the planet, but I also believe we need to be smart about how we address it. Clean air and clean water are the lifeblood of South Dakota’s agricultural, hunting, and tourism sectors, and our state is a leader in clean energy, with hydroelectric and wind creating 75 percent of our energy. I’m always willing to work together on common-sense, cost-effective ideas, but the $93 trillion Green New Deal is not one of them.
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What Senator Thune fails to mention here is the origin of the “Green New Deal” and its subsequent plank in the current Democratic platform that every Democrat candidate for President in 2020 has endorsed. That origin or issue is of course climate change, a subject that my colleagues have been fighting for decades without help from the Republicans in Washington, DC and see here the results, the “Green New Deal” (GND). As a resident of California, also, we began this fight long before our official entry to the California’s Prop 23 days beginning the day Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Climate Bill aka AB32 in 2006 that would act like a mini GND in its scope and include a Cap N Trade scheme to take your money. We who organized the initiative Prop 23 attempted to delay it but failed in the 2010 general election allowing California to market its idealism to the left’s herd mentality and its superb instant marketing platform, the internet social media. And as the saying goes what starts in California will eventually move across the country and it did. So here we are, the GND born in California and soon to be the law of the land in most likely a lesser form but it is not going away and will be a subject that Senator Thune will have to discover for the rest of his political career if he will oppose it effectively.
This is the result of years and years of Republicans ignoring the issues and allowing it to fester but after two decades of service to the US we finally got one of our Colleagues, Dr. Will Happer, into the White House as Director of the Office of Emerging Technologies & Science and currently Chair of a group of scientists to look at the validity of the climate issue as part of a Team B approach allowing finally the scientists once considered “deniers” a say in the actual science of the climate issue or global warming as it was once referred to. And let me say this. THERE WAS NEVER A SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON CLIMATE. THE TERM WAS A MARKETING STRATEGY BY LEFTISTS ACTIVISTS.
We know, and have proven the science of the left was a fraud decades ago, that the entire issue was a scapegoat for socialist policies; it could be nothing else since the science was weak and showed Man’s involvement as nothing more than minimal while they ignored major contributors to global warming like the sun and natural climate oscillations that have occurred often, the last three being 1000 years apart; speaking of the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Minoan Warm period. The activists also forgot to inform their army of activists that we are exiting the “Little Ice Age” ending around 1850 and of course it will warm up as we head into a more desirable interglacial period.
As Dr. Happer gets ridiculed by both the left and the right on his notion that CO2 is good for us and the plants and animals that inhabit the earth, he is with known sound empirical evidence is right. Not only is Happer a brilliant physicist from Princeton but he is the most renowned expert on CO2 in the world. Crops are producing larger yields today especially for C3 plants and our world’s forests are recovering stress from a drastic CO2 shortage occurring during the Little Ice Age and are once again growing. Even our giant redwood trees that had been dormant for centuries are now growing again as concentrations hit their current levels of ~400 ppmv. (Starvation levels for plants are roughly 150-200 ppmv and complex plant species formed in our history at around 7800 ppmv).
So the Green New Deal is already in effect. Our planet is growing once again with vigor and all one has to do is locate satellite photos of before and after CO2 concentrations increasing. Our planet is truly greening up. Finally, the vast amount of warming that occurred since the Little Ice Age occurred prior to 1944, occurred at night, and in the winter which displaces entirely the notion of Man causing the increase in temperature gradients. Our earth has done it before and is still capable of doing it again. Thank God, the alternative would be disastrous with 7 billion people inhabiting the earth.
The bottom line is beyond the socialist costs the proceeds from fighting climate costing $93 trillion over 10 years you can be guaranteed a Cap N Trade scheme and/or carbon tax to be implemented as other west coast and some eastern states under Democrat control have attempted as recent as 2018. Its coming folks and the proceeds to fight climate change, if its anything like California’s system, will go into paying for socialist idealisms. That is the real reason for the GND, not to save our climate from a boogeyman that doesn’t exist.
You may also notice that the left has abandoned most of their other environmental issues of real pollution, endangered species, etc. They have moved all of their resources to climate not just the US but worldwide.
Please excuse a couple malformed sentences in the previous post. It was written from a smartphone with no way to edit on this site but I’m sure you get the point.
I may be remiss not to advise that Senator Thune may be somewhat responsible for Dr. Happer’s appointment to the White House but we cannot be sure as he rarely responds to anything non agriculture in South Dakota. He was asked to deliver a letter signed by scientists to the White House encouraging the appointment. The signatories were top US physicists from the public and private sectors. However, the letter was also sent directly to the White House.
If anyone has any questions you can contact me or a good source of knowledge is the CO2 Counsel that you can Google. The Counsel is made up of top US and world scientists, Navy Admirals, and a former astronaut scientist that was the last man to walk on the moon.
The “Green Nightmare” Senator Thune talks about could have been prevented if Republicans took interest in the subject and its projected endgame years ago. I can only guess that the complexity of this science issue and science in general is far beyond the capability of politicians and even our US courts, the latter being troublesome if the Democrats continue to push this GND beyond the 2020 election.
It is not just democrats. Wind companies have greased the wheels on both sides of the isle to get Production Tax credit extensions. They are placing wind turbines in populated areas too close to homes and property lines. They want to unconstitutionally place a no safety zone on our commercial hunting property putting my hunters in that zone when they participate in that activity. They are placing them too close to public right of ways, exposing all who pass on those right of ways, including joggers, bikers, school buses etc.
They are constructing industrial complexes covering 40 to 50 thousand acres at a time. Exon Mobile was fined $600,000 for a spill that killed 40 duck (of which none were endangered). Wind turbines kill millions of bats and thousands of raptors (including hawks, golden and bald eagles). They have yet to pay a fine. Before he left office president Obama signed an order to allow them to kill an additional 450 per year nation wide.
They come into area quietly offering money and contracts for the rights of property owners pitting neighbor against neighbor. When a land owner signs a contract they are also signing a “gag” order that they can talk to no one about it and may face legal action if they do. They are some of the most deceitful and dishonest people I have ever seen. It is all about greed. The only green involved is the millions of dollars they take to the bank.
They are willing to destroy our business, wildlife, view shed and property values while lining their pockets with money. We are fighting for our rights , but we are fighting big corporations with high priced lawyers funded by millions in Production Tax Credits
And don’t forget the state legislators and local public officials. Our family spent the last three days at our capitol in Pierre. We watched the wind lobbyists swoop down on our Senators and Representatives as soon as any of the wind-related bills were heard. They testified at every hearing, either in opposition or support. And our legislators listen to them – many, many spout the jargon as if they, themselves are wind salesmen.
Then there are the local officials – our planning and zoning boards, our county commissioners, our township supervisors. The wind industry has community education programs for these folks to “educate” them, then they visit their homes and pursuade them to buy into the upcoming project. It is shameful, the number of board members across the state that have clear conflicts of interest yet fail to recuse themselves when permitting the industrial wind projects. Just because you name it a “farm” or a “park” does not change what these massive zones really represent: mankind’s willful ignorance.
Oops. Looks like somebody didn’t get a turbine lease on their land…
Oh, you better believe we were offered one. They absolutely wanted our land. We just didn’t want to become indentured for “up to 55 years”. Property rights? Ha! It really cracks me up when the folks who “host” turbines talk about their property rights (as in, “don’t tell me what I can and can’t do on my own land!”) yet sell their rights away to these modern-day carpet baggers.