The Left's 'green' policies may actually lead to more pollution, Colorado Senate candidate says

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Sen. Rand Paul: Biden administration’s clean energy push ‘nonsensical and tone-deaf’

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on the Biden administration’s push of clean energy.

The Left's restrictions on oil and gas production in the U.S., coupled with the promotion of "green" technologies like wind and solar, may actually lead to more pollution and worse carbon emissions globally in the long run, a U.S. Senate candidate who spent ten years working with the first certified carbon-neutral company in America told Fox News Digital in an interview this week.

"On the yardstick of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental policies fail," Eli Bremer, a former Olympian and Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, told Fox News Digital. He argued that "green" technologies may cost more to manufacture and maintain than they offset, in terms of carbon emissions, and he argued that by refusing to produce energy in the U.S., America is effectively offshoring energy production to countries with far lower environmental standards.

Bremer created and led the Shaklee Corporation's Olympic athlete sponsorship arm Pure Performance from 2011 to 2021. Shaklee Corporation became America's first certified carbon-neutral company in 2000. 

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Bremer told Fox News Digital that he advocates for transparency when it comes to "green" technologies. "Any government program that is supposedly green we should find out, from head to toe, does that policy actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions or not?"

Eli Bremer is a consultant and former Olympic athlete. He is running as a Republican for Senate in Colorado. (Eli Bremer )

"If you look at windmills, there’s a lot of greenhouse gas emission cost that we gloss over," the candidate noted. "We extract the raw materials from the ground, process them, assemble them, maintain them for the lifespan of the windmill, then we decommission them. Virtually every expert that I’ve talked to believes that the overall return is negative."

The true overall cost remains unknown, Bremer claimed. If elected, he aims to change that.

Besides that, the Left's environmental policies also create a perverse form of "green colonialism," the former Olympian claimed.

He recalled trips to China and Cambodia, saying he saw pollution firsthand.

"When we push our production to third-world countries, they pollute their lands," Bremer said. "We are going to third-world countries and demanding that they pillage their lands so that we can have green technologies." He mentioned "lithium mines where you have young kids put in servitude" as in the Congo.

Nov. 25, 2015: A cobalt mine pit in Tulwizembe, Katanga province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Reuters)

He recalled speaking with a county commissioner in Colorado, who said U.S. workers mine the coal, then they send it to China, where it gets burned "in a much less environmentally-friendly way." 

He recalled a trip to Cambodia during which he decided to take a boat ride, expecting a scenic view. Instead, "it was disgusting."

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"They dump their trash in the river there, and then it goes out to the ocean," Bremer recalled. "The Left is talking about not having plastic straws, but they're pushing production in others countries that don't have a waste management system."  

"The global pollution goes up when the U.S. artificially caps our production," the former Olympian argued. "We have gone so far over at this point that we're actually polluting the earth because of these policies."

Former Olympic athlete and U.S. Air Force veteran Eli Bremer on Tuesday launched a Republican Senate campaign in Colorado, aiming to challenge Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in the 2022 midterm elections. (Eli Bremer Senate campaign)

"When we're one of the most efficient energy-producing countries in the world, reducing our production is nonsensical," Bremer argued. "A sound environmental policy would also address global pollution," and Republican proposals do so better than Democratic ones.

He said that the best way to address the threat of climate change is through American energy innovation. "The fastest way to get to technologies in a green economy is to allow economies like the U.S. to produce quickly and develop new technologies," he said. "We’re not going to get new technologies out of China or India or Bangladesh." 

He also noted that Americans want more environmentally-friendly energy sources. "We can come up with a greener society much faster as Americans than the government can mandate it. Our economy will naturally do that faster and more efficiently."

"Republicans should be willing to talk about it and say, ‘Our solutions put Americans back to work. Our solutions, globally, produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.'"

Bremer also noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven the importance of energy independence.

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"Ukraine has showed that we as Americans were unwilling to face the reality that nation state conflicts were going to matter and that it is incumbent on a country to take care of your own people and to have all of the resources that you’re capable of producing inside your own borders, including energy, food, medicine, and semiconductors," he said, emphasizing that the semiconductor issue ties the U.S. to Taiwan.

"Nation-state war is coming, it’s real, and we’d better prepare for it, militarily and economically," he warned. "Anything that’s crucial to your economy, you need to be sure that you have." He also noted that the COVID-19 pandemic "should have shown us that having PPE in a foreign country is a bad policy and energy policy is the exact same."

Experts backed up some of Bremer's claims.

"Any discussion of energy sources and environmental/climate footprints needs to start from the indisputable point that the US is around 10% of global emissions and declining as a percentage of global emissions," Steve Milloy, a former Trump-Pence EPA transition member and founder of JunkScience.com, told Fox News Digital. "The point being that the US could go dark today and remain so forever and 90+% of emissions would still occur."

Steve Milloy (Steve Milloy)

"Wind and solar require strip mining for rare earth minerals in places (e.g., China, Congo) largely without environmental and labor regulations," Milloy added. "Utility-scale wind and solar require larges spaces destroying the natural landscape. Installations permanently damage the environment – each wind turbine may involve a cement and rebar foundation of hundreds of cubic yards. Keep in mind fossil fuels are required to produce the concrete and rebar."

Milloy argued that "notions of ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy are wrong-headed" because "wind and solar are always more expensive and less reliable without providing any obvious compensating upside or benefits. They also have environmental impacts, some obvious (they are eyesores), and some not so (dirty production processes occurring out of sight in foreign countries and needed underground foundations)."

Katie Tubb, senior policy analyst for energy and environmental issues at the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that "there is no perfect energy solution out there right now – they all involve tradeoffs, pros, and cons."

For this reason, Tubb argued, "it's counterproductive for policymakers to get in between energy producers and energy consumers by inserting their own political mandates and subsidies. Energy policy should allow all energy resources and technologies to compete on their own merits."

She referenced the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which projects "no scenario in which global demand for oil and natural gas do not increase through at least 2050." Since the demand for these resources is "not going away," Tubb argued that "if the US curtails its own production then it will likely find itself in a similar situation as Europe today."

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Tubb also agreed with Bremer that wind and solar technologies "consume a lot more land to produce the same amount of energy, are not ‘energy dense,’ are dependent on weather, have shorter operating lifespans, require a lot of infrastructure to connect them to customers, and must be properly disposed of. They require heavy industry (which requires fossil fuels) and critical minerals to be manufactured, which must be mined – unfortunately, the Biden administration has hamstrung domestic mining in a variety of regulations and land management decisions."

Neither the League of Conservation Voters nor the Sierra Club responded to Fox News Digital's requests for comment on Bremer's claims.