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Energy

Opinion: A Kamala Harris Presidency Is The Stuff Of Nightmares

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6 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By PETER MURPHY

 

Vice President Kamala Harris is one election away from winning the White House and accelerating America’s climate hysteria that is already well underway thanks to the outgoing President Joe Biden.

“There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” then-Sen. Harris said during a CNN-sponsored town hall back in 2019, during her ill-fated run for president.

That same year, she threw her support behind the Green New Dealproposed by  New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. That is a plan that would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to “transition” America from oil, gas and coal sources to so-called wind, solar and batteries–or, rather, to subjugate the nation to an all-powerful green state under the command of the federal government.

Harris later teamed with AOC to introduce the Climate Equity Act, which was a confusing, word-salad of a bill to address climate “injustice” in “front-line communities” using the familiar means of creating a massive new federal bureaucracy.

During Harris’ short-lived campaign for president, which crashed and burned months before the 2020 caucus and primary votes, she called for a climate pollution fee that would “make polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.”  Typical of so many climate falsehoods, Harris conflates carbon emissions with “pollution.”

In his letter to the nation last Sunday announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race, President Joe Biden boasted that he had overseen passage of the “most significant climate legislation in the history of the world” — an apparent reference to his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. This “significant” legislation included hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare for companies to build wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles and other climate-related projects.

Because, after all, the U.S. is “the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change – still the second largest today after China’ said a story posted by the climate-rabid media outlet, Yahoo News.  Expect a President Harris to double down on such unscientific drivel.

In a modern historical anomaly, Harris is poised to become a major party’s presidential nominee without a single caucus or primary vote, which is a throwback to the old days of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms at convention time.

Still, Harris is among the most privileged Americans to ever become a presidential nominee of a major political party, though not without difficulties. Her parents were both college professors, but they divorced when she was young. Following law school, Harris became a prosecutor in the Alameda County attorney’s office. With the assistance of her politically powerful mentor and very close friend, the charismatic California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, she was appointed to several public jobs, elected as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, and then U.S. senator.

After becoming a senator, Harris began running for president. Her 2020 presidential campaign helped reveal her radical positions on climate and a host of other issues and enabled her to get on the short list of vice presidential choices.

With Biden’s mental and physical decline now so obvious, Harris has become the beneficiary of a ninth-inning political coup d’état against the president, engineered by Democratic Party leaders, who pressured him to drop his re-election campaign on the eve of the party’s nominating convention.

Harris is no Scranton-born, working-class pretender, who rode Amtrak. She does not have any record of political centrism, moderation or bipartisanship, which Biden practiced off and on throughout his career and helped him win the presidency in 2020.

By contrast, Harris is a product of the one-party state of California, who supported destructive policies on climate change, energy, crime and welfare that helped spark in California high fuel costs, declining living standards and a population exodus.

The election of 2024 will have climate change on the ballot, as did the 2020 election. The big difference this time is that Americans have experienced more than ever the inflationary and detrimental effects of climate policies with no impact on climate change.

And, it is not a supposed moderate candidate making the climate sale to the public, but a true believer, Kamala Harris.

Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington D.C.-based organization in support of free market, technological solutions to energy and environmental challenges.

Energy

China undermining American energy independence, report says

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From The Center Square

By 

The Chinese Communist Party is exploiting the left’s green energy movement to hurt American energy independence, according to a new report from State Armor.

Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor, says the report shows how Energy Foundation China funds green energy initiatives that make America more reliant on China, especially on technology with known vulnerabilities.

“Our report exposes how Energy Foundation China functions not as an independent nonprofit, but as a vehicle advancing the strategic interests of the Chinese Communist Party by funding U.S. green energy initiatives to shift American supply chains toward Beijing and undermine our energy security,” Lucci said in a statement before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee’s hearing on Wednesday titled “Enter the Dragon – China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.”

Lucci said the group’s operations represent a textbook example of Chinese influence in America.

“This is a very good example of how the Chinese Communist Party operates influence operations within the United States. I would actually describe it as a perfect case study from their perspective,” he told The Center Square in a phone interview. “They’re using American money to leverage American policy changes that make the American energy grid dependent upon China.”

Lucci said one of the most concerning findings is that China-backed technology entering the U.S. power grid includes components with “undisclosed back doors” – posing a direct threat to the power grid.

“These are not actually green tech technologies. They’re red technologies,” he said. “We are finding – and this is open-source news reporting – they have undisclosed back doors in them. They’re described in a Reuters article as rogue communication devices… another way to describe that is kill switches.”

Lucci said China exploits American political divisions on energy policy to insert these technologies under the guise of environmental progress.

“Yes, and it’s very crafty,” he said. “We are not addressing the fact that these green technologies are red. Technologies controlled by the Communist Party of China should be out of the question.”

Although Lucci sees a future for carbon-free energy sources in the United States – particularly nuclear and solar energy – he doesn’t think the country should use technology from a foreign adversary to do it.

“It cannot be Chinese solar inverters that are reported in Reuters six weeks ago as having undisclosed back doors,” he said. “It cannot be Chinese batteries going into the grid … that allow them to sabotage our grid.”

Lucci said energy is a national security issue, and the United States is in a far better position to achieve energy independence than China.

“We are luckily endowed with energy independence if we choose to have it. China is not endowed with that luxury,” he said. “They’re poor in natural resources. We’re very well endowed – one of the best – with natural resources for energy production.”

He said that’s why China continues to build coal plants – and some of that coal comes from Australia – while pushing the United States to use solar energy.

“It’s very foolish of us to just make ourselves dependent on their technologies that we don’t need, and which are coming with embedded back doors that give them actual control over our energy grid,” he said.

Lucci says lawmakers at both the state and federal levels need to respond to this threat quickly.

“The executive branch should look at whether Energy Foundation China is operating as an unregistered foreign agent,” he said. “State attorneys general should be looking at these back doors that are going into our power grid – undisclosed back doors. That’s consumer fraud. That’s a deceptive trade practice.”

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Energy

Carney’s Bill C-5 will likely make things worse—not better

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From the Fraser Institute

By Niels Veldhuis and Jason Clemens

The Carney government’s signature legislation in its first post-election session of Parliament—Bill C-5, known as the Building Canada Act—recently passed the Senate for final approval, and is now law. It gives the government unprecedented powers and will likely make Canada even less attractive to investment than it is now, making a bad situation even worse.

Over the past 10 years, Canada has increasingly become known as a country that is un-investable, where it’s nearly impossible to get large and important projects, from pipelines to mines, approved. Even simple single-site redevelopment projects can take a decade to receive rezoning approval. It’s one of the primary reasons why Canada has experienced a mass exodus of investment capital, some $387 billion from 2015 to 2023. And from 2014 to 2023, the latest year of comparable data, investment per worker (excluding residential construction and adjusted for inflation) dropped by 19.3 per cent, from $20,310 to $16,386 (in 2017 dollars).

In theory, Bill C-5 will help speed up the approval process for projects deemed to be in the “national interest.” But the cabinet (and in practical terms, the prime minister) will determine the “national interest,” not the private sector. The bill also allows the cabinet to override existing laws, regulations and guidelines to facilitate investment and the building of projects such as pipelines, mines and power transmission lines. At a time when Canada is known for not being able to get large projects done, many are applauding this new approach, and indeed the bill passed with the support of the Opposition Conservatives.

But basically, it will allow the cabinet to go around nearly every existing hurdle impeding or preventing large project developments, and the list of hurdles is extensive: Bill C-69 (which governs the approval process for large infrastructure projects including pipelines), Bill C-48 (which effectively bans oil tankers off the west coast), the federal cap on greenhouse gas emissions for only the oil and gas sector (which effectively means a cap or even reductions in production), a quasi carbon tax on fuel (called the Clean Fuels Standard), and so on.

Bill C-5 will not change any of these problematic laws and regulations. It simply will allow the cabinet to choose when and where they’re applied. This is cronyism at its worst and opens up the Carney government to significant risks of favouritism and even corruption.

Consider firms interested in pursuing large projects. If the bill becomes the law of the land, there won’t be a new, better and more transparent process to follow that improves the general economic environment for all entrepreneurs and businesses. Instead, there will be a cabinet (i.e. politicians) with new extraordinary powers that firms can lobby to convince that their project is in the “national interest.”

Indeed, according to some reports, some senators are referring to Bill C-5 as the “trust me” law, meaning that because there aren’t enough details and guardrails within the legislation, senators who vote in favour are effectively “trusting” Prime Minister Carney and his cabinet to do the right thing, effectively and consistently over time.

Consider the ambiguity in the legislation and how it empowers discretionary decisions by the cabinet. According to the legislation, cabinet “may consider any factor” it “considers relevant, including the extent to which the project can… strengthen Canada’s autonomy, resilience and security” or “provide economic benefits to Canada” or “advance the interests of Indigenous peoples” or “contribute to clean growth and to meeting Canada’s objectives with respect to climate change.”

With this type of “criteria,” nearly anything cabinet or the prime minister can dream up could be deemed in the “national interest” and therefore provide the prime minister with unprecedented and near unilateral powers.

In the preamble to the legislation, the government said it wants an accelerated approval process, which “enhances regulatory certainty and investor confidence.” In all likelihood, Bill C-5 will do the opposite. It will put more power in the hands of a very few in government, lead to cronyism, risks outright corruption, and make Canada even less attractive to investment.

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