When your plan is so far to the loony side that you’ve even lost the Washington Post Editorial Board
Bernie Sanders’s climate plan will take us nowhere
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.) released a climate plan last week. In his characteristic style, he excited a class of left-wing ideologues — and elicited eye rolls from everyone else.
The proposal calls for $16.3 trillion in new spending over a decade to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in electricity production and transportation by 2030 — nearly 10 times the amount former vice president and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed spending. By 2050, the country would no longer produce net greenhouse gas emissions. At least this latter goal is right. So much else in the plan is wrongheaded.
(a couple paragraphs discussing the idiotic plan, including stopping all future nuclear plants and getting rid of existing ones)
As with practically every grandiose program Mr. Sanders proposes, we are left wondering what the democratic socialist would actually do as president. Nothing resembling his climate plan could pass Congress, even with a strong Democratic majority. Mr. Sanders typically retorts that he will lead a political revolution. But he will not change the fact that the nation is ideologically pluralistic.
On climate policy, the key is to get the most bang for the nation’s buck. The task is so large that direct government spending on projects such as power plants is a recipe for unconscionable waste. Mr. Sanders’s promise to divert national wealth into proven boondoggles such as high-speed rail is another red flag.
The entire thing is a red flag.
No central planner can know exactly how and where to invest for an efficient and effective energy transition. That is why economists continue to recommend that the government take a simple, two-pronged approach: invest in scientific research and prime the market to accept new, clean technologies with a substantial and steadily rising carbon tax. People and businesses would find the most effective ways to avoid the increasingly high, tax-inflated costs of using dirty fuels. Maybe that would mean building huge new solar farms throughout the country. Maybe it would mean massive energy efficiency gains driven by home retrofits or new appliances. Maybe it would mean continuing to accept some role for nuclear power.
We do not know, precisely, what the most efficient path looks like. We are also certain that Mr. Sanders does not.
Even the climate cultists on the WPEB know that Comrade Bernie is stark raving mad with this plan, which is more like the central planning from the Soviet Union than anything else. What they are missing, though, is that the hardcores in the Cult are super enthused by the plan, because they do not stop to think, they just react. You know, like the loonies in the Sunrise Movement and the U.S. version of Extinction Rebellion.
