President Joe Biden, Democrats, and the far Left think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the perfect opportunity to force the United States to transition away from coal, oil, and natural gas, which supply us and the world with 80% of all energy. As Obama ally Rahm Emanuel was fond of saying, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”
This pie-in-the-sky attempt to move the country away from traditional energy sources will hurt regular people even more. And it will empower and embolden our adversaries: authoritarian Russia and communist China.
The Biden White House seems to believe that we can transition to wind and solar in a short time. A rapid transition will create astronomical inflation, an unstable electric grid, and it’s not possible in the real world. Power doesn’t come from unicorn tears and pixie dust. The numbers show that rapidly transitioning to wind and solar is a fool’s errand.
Last year 70,000 wind towers in the U.S. produced 9% of our electricity. But the production was inconsistent because it depends almost entirely on the wind’s vagaries. Sometimes wind towers could generate 2% of America’s electricity, and sometimes they could generate 25%. In contrast, 93 nuclear power plants produced 20% of our electricity reliably on a full-time basis.
The U.S. is adding about 3,000 wind towers per year. Can we bump this up to 30,000 a year? Not in the real world. And increasingly, large wind installations are facing significant local opposition. Stunningly, local communities vetoed 31 big wind and 13 big solar projects last year. We would need 650,000 wind towers just to produce 80% of our electricity.
Yet if hundreds of thousands of wind towers magically appeared, the public would still have to pay for full-time on-demand power to keep our electricity on 24/7. This is because wind and solar produce little or no energy about 70% of the time. Otherwise, the power will stop flowing to our houses, hospitals, businesses, and grocery stores whenever the wind stops blowing.
Transitioning entirely to wind towers wouldn’t fix the climate, either. A Harvard University study points out that the construction of thousands of new wind towers will raise temperatures by 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. And a Nature study points out that large solar farms heat the air around them by as much as 5.4 degrees to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Somehow the far Left believes we must warm the Earth to cool it.
Climate activists argue that throwing away oil and gas will somehow save the Earth from imminent doom, but that isn’t true. We are experiencing gentle, beneficial warming that is improving the world. Worldwide crop harvests and yields are up 33%, and forests the size of France have regrown naturally because of additional carbon dioxide in the air.
So if green solutions aren’t practical, what is the president thinking? The answer is that he has pledged fealty to green dogma and is willing to push flawed and unpopular policies just to placate his base.
During his time in office, Biden has pressured bankers, corporations, regulators of all sorts, and insurers to make it difficult for meat producers through regulations, stopping financing and insuring meat production and infrastructure. The result is higher prices and more inflation as the administration blames companies for inflation.
Of course, Biden and the Democrats are also attempting to blame inflation and soaring prices on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But Biden has decreased the supply of the fuels that provide 80% of our energy, and he offers no substitute. The resulting gas price spikes are his fault.
The answer is for Biden to do an about-face, as Clinton did with some of his unpopular policies. He needs to break with the far Left and give us people what our economy desperately needs — affordable energy.
If Biden would support pipelines, drilling permits, refineries, and oil and natural gas infrastructure, fuel costs would quickly go down.
We desperately need energy independence again. Unfortunately, the president appears to be working against this goal.
Frank Lasee is a former Wisconsin state senator and former member of Gov. Scott Walker’s administration. The district he represented had two nuclear power plants, a biomass plant, and numerous wind towers.
