Justin Haskins: Despite coronavirus deceptions, China would gain more power under Dems' energy policies

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Energy executive says Joe Biden's green energy comments were enormous miscalculation

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he'd sacrifice jobs for green energy; reaction from David Spigelmyer, president of Marcellus Shale Coalition.

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After years of the left endlessly bloviating about the alleged dangers of Russia to U.S. democracy, Americans are finally realizing that the greatest threat to the United States is actually the Communist Party of China, a group that has violated more people’s rights and murdered more innocent civilians than any other in the history of the world.

The Chinese Communist Party might not be quite as ruthless as it was under the tyrannical dictator Mao Zedong, but it still regularly violates the rights of its people, sometimes in the most horrifying ways imaginable.

And, as we’ve learned throughout the course of the coronavirus crisis, the Chinese Communist Party is completely untrustworthy and willing to do anything that’s necessary to protect its own power, including putting the lives of millions of people around the world at risk.

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But despite China’s long track record of abuses, policymakers and large corporations in the United States have continued to make Americans increasingly more dependent on China, and I’m not merely referring to cheap T-shirts and televisions.

China now controls – directly or indirectly – massive portions of America’s economy, including in essential industries like health care. More than 80 percent of pharmaceuticals sold in the United States today come from China, along with the vast majority of essential medical machinery and equipment. About $2 billion worth of medical devices and parts for medical machinery come from China every year.

Instead of trying to make America less dependent on China, many on the Left are feverishly working to expand that dependence, this time in the energy sector.

Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are two of the nation’s worst offenders. Both have said that they would force the entire country to become reliant on so-called “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar. (Bernie is a supporter of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical Green New Deal proposal, which would impose renewable energy on every corner of the U.S. and ban fossil fuels over just a 10-year period.)

Although many people think of windmills and solar facilities as local energy sources, the truth is that neither source of energy can operate without natural resources and rare earth minerals that are mined and processed in other countries, especially in – you guessed it – China.

If America were to adopt the Green New Deal policies of Sanders or the Green New Deal-lite policies of Biden, nearly the entire nation would be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party,

Paul Driessen, a senior policy adviser at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and The Heartland Institute, noted recently in a Heartland policy paper that renewable energy “technologies require rare earth elements (REEs), including indium and tellurium in photovoltaic solar panels and dysprosium and neodymium in wind turbines. A single 1.5-MW [megawatt] turbine requires about 500 pounds of REEs, while a 3-MW turbine needs nearly two tons of rare earth elements.”

According to Driessen’s review of U.S. government sources, more than 70 percent of the rare earth minerals needed to operate renewable wind and solar facilities “are mined in China or by companies under Chinese control.”

That means that if America were to adopt the Green New Deal policies of Sanders or the Green New Deal-lite policies of Biden, nearly the entire nation would be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, making China the most powerful country in the world.

These policies are totally at odds with those of the Trump administration and the conservatives in Congress – not all of them, unfortunately – who support affordable domestic energy production. Thanks to their efforts, the United States has become more energy independent than it has been in decades, and millions of jobs have been added over the past decade in industries related to domestic oil and natural gas production.

In December 2019, the Energy Information Administration predicted the United States would become a net exporter of crude oil and fuel in 2020.

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Although it’s hard to say exactly how all this will pan out in the near term in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic, it’s clear that under the Trump administration, Americans have become less dependent on the rest of the world for its energy, making the nation more prosperous and much safer.

Why, then, would Sanders and Biden want to undo those tremendous gains? To stop a man-caused global warming catastrophe, they say, despite the fact that the evidence that global warming is an “existential threat” to humanity is virtually nonexistent and that regardless of what we do in the United States, countries like China will continue to rely on affordable energy sources like coal and natural gas.

In fact, in recent years China has been expanding its reliance on coal by so much that China’s use of it is now four times greater than that of the United States. Even more stunning, the amount of coal power generation China is planning on adding in the future is slightly greater than total U.S. coal generation today.

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Sanders and Biden are trying to prevent a nonexistent catastrophe from occurring by demanding that the federal government make the United States dependent on a country that is doing everything it can to undermine the Left’s own global warming policies – all while putting Americans at risk and driving well-functioning, prosperous U.S. industries out of business.

Sounds like a recipe for a disaster to me.

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