Biden's Green New Deal Is Increasing Greenhouse Gases
Here's an amazing but true statistic. After more than a decade of declining carbon emissions here in the United States, in 2021, President Joe Biden's first year in office, emissions rose.
In other words, not only have Biden's energy policies been a disaster for our economy and national security as we have become more dependent on Russia and Iran, but they haven't worked as a global warming solution.
To understand the utter futility of Biden's "renewable energy" crusade, we must go back about 15 years in time to when the amazing shale revolution, thanks to energy pioneers such as Harold Hamm of Oklahoma, the man who drilled the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, began. These new drilling techniques have vastly expanded America's natural gas production over the past decade and turned America into the world's leading oil and gas superpower.
Because clean natural gas production soared and replaced coal as the No. 1 source of power generation, not only did America get rich off these bountiful resources but we also reduced our greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, over the six years covering 2014 through 2020, we led the world in our reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Our emissions fell by 22%. That was more than former President Barack Obama's cap-and-tax plan would have reduced these emissions.
Ironically, the 10-year trend of declining carbon dioxide emissions actually ended when Biden took office. The conventional explanation for this is that as the economy opened up after COVID-19, emissions rose. People were flying less and driving their cars a lot more.
But that is only part of the story. Iconoclastic environmentalist Michael Shellenberger explains the bigger story:
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