Biden’s environmental plan needs a reality check
The market is already driving development of clean green energy
The closest President Trump came to laying a glove on former Vice President Joe Biden in their first debate was on the environment.
Biden’s published clean energy plan — which is more a gushing hydrant of wishes — is somewhat incoherent, certainly expensive at $2 trillion, and looks counterproductive.
It is built on the left-wing assumption that all commerce, and the electric power industry particularly, is managed by people who would trade away the future for a few pieces of silver; that humanity stops at the corporate door.
This was true once. I’ve been in meetings where circumventing restrictions on coal were discussed and where global warming was regarded as a communist conspiracy.
But now environmentalism is as active in corporate boardrooms as it is in the inner sanctums of Democratic thinking. Younger workers in corporations and shareholders have been demanding this activity. Biden needs to smell the roses, be less woke more awake.
Particularly disturbing are the list of executive orders Biden says he’ll sign on his first day in office. One would hope after the flood of executive orders signed by Trump, many of them sowing more confusion than direction, that Biden would abide by more acceptable norms of governance. Substantial environmental law needs Congress.
If, as his published policy says, Biden signs these orders on day one of his presidency, on day two the courts will be flooded with lawsuits seeking to uphold the laws already in place, not to have them modified by extra-legal action.
The fact is that business today is not the business of yesterday. It is leading an environmental revolution and is, arguably, in the forefront of a new business dawn. This is especially true in the three places where the difference in greenhouse gas releases count: electricity production, transportation and manufacturing processes which use a lot of heat.
A wind of change is sweeping through the United States on environmental issues, and it should be allowed to blow free and strong. It is more complete, more encompassing and, in the end, will be more effective than if a possible Biden administration tries to control or direct it.
Consider these indicators of the low-carbon wave that is sweeping across the country:
• Five of the nation’s largest utilities are aiming to be carbon-free by 2050: Southern Company, Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, and Public Service En
This Nov. 3, 2008, file photo, shows one of Pacific Gas and Electric's Diablo Canyon Power Plant's nuclear reactors in Avila Beach , Calif. Pacific Gas & Electric Co.