Joe Biden’s presidency has foundered as gasoline prices have soared, with readings in numerous polls showing record or near-record low favorability. Biden’s climate change policies, which many blame for the sudden surge in fuel costs, are now highly unpopular among average Americans, a new I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
For our online July I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from July 6-9, we asked 1,643 adults across America to consider the following statement: “President Biden has said that record-high gasoline and electricity prices are necessary for meeting his goal of eliminating fossil fuels in the U.S. to fight climate change.”
Respondents were then asked to respond to a question with five choices: “Would you say you:
1.) Agree with Biden’s climate change policy, even if it means higher energy prices.
2.) Disagree with Biden’s policy, and want more energy produced to decrease prices.
3.) Don’t think global climate change should be a U.S. policy priority.
4.) I don’t believe in climate change.
5.) Not sure.
The answer that came back loud and clear will not be comforting to either Biden or his Democratic Party advisers: Just 32% of those answering the poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points, said they support Biden’s climate change policy even if it means higher energy prices.
But a far larger majority of 57% answered in the negative. They either said they disagreed with his policies and want more and cheaper energy (41%), or don’t think climate change should be a U.S. policy priority (10%), or don’t even believe that the climate is changing (6%).
This is a significant repudiation of the Biden administration’s “Green Agenda,” which is now being blamed by many for the recent surge in energy prices and inflation, not to mention a growing sense of insecurity in global food and oil markets.
The split would be even wider if not for one group: Democrats. Just 30% say they disagree with Biden’s climate change policies, while 58% say they agree.
But even among Democrats, 24% say they want more energy and cheaper prices, while 5% don’t think climate change should be a policy focus and 2% aren’t really sure the climate is changing. And 11% of Democrats said they aren’t sure (numbers may not add perfectly to 100% due to rounding.)
That leaves substantial majorities of both Republicans (86%) and independents (66%) who reject Biden’s green policies and higher energy prices, who agree climate shouldn’t be a policy priority, or who don’t believe climate change is real.
In short, Biden’s costly Plan for Climate Change and Environmental Justice is popular with few outside of the Democratic Party.
Yet Biden has refused to alter course on his policies that make it harder, more costly and in many cases impossible to drill for more oil, forcing Americans to pay record-high prices to fill their gas tanks while they continue to foot the bill for windmills and solar panels that can never supply all of America’s energy needs.
Does this mean trouble ahead in the upcoming midterm elections? Many voters today link the surge in energy prices to both the left’s Green Agenda and to the sudden upsurge in annual inflation, which has risen every month of Biden’s presidency, at least as of June 2022. Democrats are suffering in the polls as a result.
The growing disquiet over the cost of going green could also damage Biden’s hopes in 2024, which increasingly seem imperiled by his own party’s misgivings over a run for a second term. As a matter of postwar history, the record is clear that presidents who undergo significant bouts of inflation during their time in office experience serious political trouble.
“It’s been a while, but we remember how inflation ravages the economy, sours the national mood, and poisons the electoral prospects of a president and his party,” an NPR piece noted. And that was written in late 2021. The picture has only gotten worse since then.
The poll’s responses also underscore alarming reports from around the world about how global climate change policies have harmed economies, disrupted world food supplies, and led to increasingly violent antigovernment riots and farmer revolts in countries as diverse as Germany, The Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Ghana and South Africa.
A recent United Nations report warned that 2.3 billion people globally suffered modest or severe hunger in 2021, an increase from the year before, and that this alarming fact “should dispel any lingering doubts that the world is moving backwards in its efforts to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms.”
What’s to blame? Another U.N. report may help explain. In this poll, 10 million people worldwide were asked to rank 16 issues in order of importance. “Climate change” finished dead last.
For this, many blame green energy policies such as the ones pushed by the Biden administration but other nations too that have pushed up prices by reducing energy supplies to the global marketplace. And it includes so-called “green” or “organic” farming practices imposed on farmers by wealthy nations, global food and development agencies, NGOs, and so-called “Environment, Social and Governance” (ESG) investment funds in the U.S. and Europe.
The image of policy failure won’t be helped by Biden’s recent trip to the Mideast to beg the Saudi government to pump more oil to ease energy prices, only to return empty-handed.
It was further hurt by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who, in a recent interview, talked animatedly about high gasoline prices and suggested that a solution would be “cutting the cost of electric vehicles, because when you have an electric vehicle then you’re also gonna be able to save on gas.”
But as both Tesla maker Elon Musk and Toyota’s top scientist have recently noted, there’s not enough electrical output in the world to fuel a massive increase in electric car usage. Musk is on record as saying that an all-electric vehicle fleet would require a doubling of the world’s electrical output, a feat entirely out of reach under current policies.
The I&I/TIPP Poll results plainly show that Americans by and large repudiate Biden’s climate-change policies and want a return to plentiful energy, low prices and an end to wrenching changes imposed by remote bureaucrats to bring about a global green “Great Reset.”
I&I/TIPP publishes polling data each month on this topic and others of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past five presidential elections.
Terry Jones is an editor of Issues & Insights. His four decades of journalism experience include serving as national issues editor, economics editor, and editorial page editor for Investor’s Business Daily.
And the mean tweets. We want our mean tweets back too please.
I want America back, before it’s too late to recover.
So we can save the environment and get rid of fossil fuels by driving electric cars, right?
Read this.
SUBJECT: BATTERIES
Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That’s important.
They do not make electricity– they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, diesel-fueled generators or minerals. So, to say an Electric Vehicle (EV)
is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see? If not, read on.
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject. In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the
costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is
also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to
take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.”
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?” And the Chinese just bought most of these mines!
I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. “Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure. We have been lied to and hoodwinked all through two years of this so-called pandemic. A lot of people, like the supreme liar Fauci and others should be in jail.
Forget the EV Biden the Bumbler your ideas are way to idiotic