I&I Editorial
The 2020 Democratic presidential field is in near unanimous agreement that fracking has to be banned or at least regulated to death over time. It plays well to the party’s base, especially its green fringe. It’s also an endorsement of recession.
Joe Biden, currently atop the Democratic primary polls, recently said he would “love to” ban fracking “right now,” and would also “love to make sure we can’t use any oil or gas, period,” reports Common Dreams, a website that caters to leftist and socialist devotees.
But the decelerated Delawarean’s plan is to “transition away from” fracking rather than killing it all at once. So put him in the “slow death” category among Democrat candidates. Meanwhile, in the summary execution category we find Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Warren even said that on the day she is inaugurated, “I will ban fracking — everywhere.”
The Democrats are shockingly insensitive to the harm their energy plans would inflict on Americans. Former Vice President “‘We’re all dead‘ if we don’t stop using fossil fuels” Biden told the crowd at a coal town earlier this week that miners can just learn code after Democrats kill their jobs. The callousness and arrogance are appalling.
But it’s not only coal miners who will suffer under the Democrats’ energy agenda. The entire world would be hurt.
“If the U.S. imposed a fracking ban, the supply disruption would trigger the biggest oil and natural gas price spikes in history — almost certainly by more than 200% — which would, in turn, tip the world into recession,” Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Mark Mills wrote last month in a policy brief.
In fact, the Democrats don’t have to do much more than run their mouths to cause economic troubles.
“Even the expectation that a ban could be enacted would destabilize markets,” Mills writes.
While a fracking ban would eliminate only 7% of global oil and 17% of the gas supply, he says, “in a global commodity market … changes of even 1%–2% in the supply/demand balance trigger huge price swings.”
Mills reminds us that the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which removed only 7% of oil from the global market yet caused prices to surge 400%, set off a global recession. Six years later, “the Iranian revolution took a comparable 5% of oil off world markets and prices spiked over 200%, sparking another global recession.”
A fracking ban appeals not only to the eco-radicals of the left, it would satisfy the Democrats’ “recession lust.” They, as well as their supporters touched by Trump Derangement Syndrome, need a downturn to “get rid of Trump.”
“We see Democratic leaders and the ‘unbiased’ media openly rooting for a recession,” economist Stephen Moore wrote in late August in the Washington Times. “The drumbeat for an economic contraction has been nonstop for the last two weeks.”
Just days before Moore’s op-ed was published, Biden said “I never wish for a recession. Period.” But we know that inside, Biden and his Democratic family, as well as the party operatives in the media, would welcome a recession because it would give them the “serious crisis” they so desperately want so that they can expand their raw political power by taking the White House and possibly the Senate.
While it doesn’t look like they’ll get the 2020 recession they’re hoping for, the Democrats would surely get one if they are ever successful in their furious efforts to outlaw fracking. That the downturn came on their watch wouldn’t bother them at all. They’d blame it on Trump, and the media would go along for the ride, publishing, broadcasting, and streaming a noxious river of news stories, “analyses,” op-eds, and editorials assuring the country that the previous administration’s tax-cutting/deregulatory agenda wrecked the economy.
At the same time, both groups would have their eyes on the next agenda item that would deepen the recession — and use it to further consolidate their political and cultural dominion over a nation that was intended to be the model of liberty for the entire world.
— Written by J. Frank Bullitt
Editor’s note: The original version incorrectly identified Pete Buttigieg as mayor of Indianapolis.
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Hey Biden, why don’t you and the rest of the Climate Change followers stop using oil first, be a real leaders. This is not about the Climate it is once again about control. Today’s Democrats are just like FDR, control freaks.
Where did you get the idea that Pete Buttigieg was Mayor of Indianapolis? You’re about 150 miles off.
It is all about timing. In fall 2016 market started moving up in anticipation of the end of the Obama Era. In 2008, the expectation of that Democrats would win, ess a factor contributing to thr markets downward trajectory.
Pelosi knows that if she only creates the perception that Democrats may win in 2020, tha market will do down, helping to sway voters.
The good news is this does not seem to be happening.
Let me help everyone here out – in a few very short years the world’s entire fossil fuels industry will be out of business.
Yep, a few very short years.
Solar, wind and battery storage is running wild around the globe. Every day the percentage of energy derived from them goes up and up and up. Every day the percentage derived from fossil fuels goes down, down, down. There’s no stopping that trend.
Tesla is selling hundreds of thousands of EVs with millions more on the way. The other major car manufactures are right behind them. In a few years the thought to owning an ICE vehicle will seem odd – like buying a typewriter or going to Blockbuster video.
The world’s “Kodak moment” is rapidly approaching. In 1999 Kodak had a market cap of $44 billion – today it’s worthless. This will be the story of Exxon-Mobil, the entire fracking industry and any other entity tied to the fossil fuels industry.
One day in the not so distant future the whole oil, coal and gas industry is going to topple over. Coal is already gone. Oil only subsidized by a desperate Saudi Arabia(who sees the writing on the wall), and NG will soon follow.
The age of fossil fuels is over. The age of renewable energy is here. That’s all there is to it…
Dream on. That is what the Left has been saying for 60 years.
OK… what is the renewable energy replacement for Airplanes?
So what’s the problem? If it is happening so fast, keep up the coal to maintain supply until it isn’t needed and don’t preempt it causing a shortage.
The US uses 4000 TW, For renewable to produce that wattage would require (excluding nuclear) 30 billion acres. That is 30 times all the farm land in the country.r
Yes, and Hillary has it in the bag 99%.
Below are some items you might enjoy.
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Aha! You’ve revealed that Joseph Hall and Paul Ehrlich are the same person. Who woulda thought?
Riiight. Please elaborate on the electric motors and batteries that will replace the internal combustion engine.
Hey J. Frank B.
Get your facts straight! Idiot Mayor Pete was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, NOT Indianapolis!
Is there one item on their agenda that would make America better? In any way? Ever?
Yes. Put a price on carbon.
How about putting a price on freedom?
In “The Keys to the White House”, Lichtman’s historically based prediction system, which has gone 9 for 9 in the last presidential elections, has 13 T/F questions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/?utm_term=.b85f4911cf38
Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. (T/F) – [Waiting on the ability of Wall Street to manipulate]
Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. (T/F) – [Waiting]
Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. [ F unless it is shown Untainted by Manufactured Scandal]
Are the only ones yet to be settled.
The other 11 currently running 8-1 and only need 7
POTUS.45 Alread setting at 8. Lights Going Out, Party Over.
Elizabeth Warren’s ConsumerFinancialProtectionBureau was intended to be available as a fortified post in the economic heights occupied by Marxists immune to incoming Republican Administrations with the power to trigger a recession on demand and extort banks for contributions always. One of the outstanding successes of the Trump administrations and the Republican Senate was gaining control of this post. If they had not, we would be in a banking recession right now.
Democrats will have to scurry to bring about a recession before Nov 3rd 2020, because it takes two 3 month periods of 0% or negative GDP to declare a recession. From the looks of things, after the humiliation of Iran this week, the drop in oil prices, and the Dow about to cross the 29,000 level, 4th quarter 2019, GDP will probably come in later this month, at, or above 3%, making a dive to 0% by June 30th, end of 2nd quarter 2020, damn near impossible. After that Trump’s home free. Too bad so many people are so desperately invested in hatred to wish against their own best economic interests, but then wishes only come true in fairy tales. Funny to recall that similar to Trump’s tax cuts, effective Jan 1, 2018, Reagan’s economy was finally going gangbusters by 1984 after the 1982 tax cuts, and Reagan of course won 49 states against Walter ‘I’ll will definitely raise your taxes’ Mondale, the same thing being said by Sanders and Warren today.
Publicizing the Democrats’ desire to catapult the American economy into a recession through energy starvation is an important service to the public. More Americans should know about it. Granted, if they were able to endure listening to the Dems’ presidential “debates,” they’d know already, but how many of us have that kind of fortitude?