Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal wouldn't slow climate change, but your electricity costs would skyrocket
By Roy Spencer
http://tinyurl.com/y2j3f523
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal would require Americans to rely on unreliable solar and wind energy that would
raise electric bills by several hundred percent for every family and business, hit us with
power blackouts and brownouts,
worsen poverty and do
nothing to slow climate change.
Yes, you read that right. Even the
drastic, unrealistic and multitrillion-dollar energy schemes in the Green New Deal would have
no measurable impact on global temperatures
in our lives or our grandchildren's lifetimes.
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., knows little if anything about climate science. She has come up with
a plan that is the equivalent of amputating your leg to deal with an ingrown toenail. The "cure" is
far more harmful than the problem it is designed to solve.
Nine of the 10 desired outcomes of Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal mention environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from our use of fossil fuels. The goal is 100 percent reliance on renewable energy in 10 years....
...Whether we like it or not, the world runs mostly on fossil fuels, which have the
advantage of very large energy density and availability, day or night, even when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Solar and wind energy are not free. They are only practical in limited regions, and they
require huge diversions of funds to produce
relatively small amounts of energy per acre of land and physical resources used.
The intermittency of solar and wind energy causes instability and inefficiencies in the electric grid. Across European countries,
the cost of electricity doubles for only a 25 percent reliance on wind and solar power....
....It's legitimate to ask just how much future climate change would be averted if (for example) the world fully embraced the Paris Climate Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The answer is
a virtually unmeasurable amount: global warming would be reduced by
0.17 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, even if the agreement's 2030 goal is extended for another
70 years.
And that
assumes computer projections of future warming are reliable. One 2018 study of ocean and atmospheric warming since the late 1800s found that
climate models are overestimating global warming from increasing greenhouse gases by about a factor of two.
And even that study assumed that 100 percent of the warming is humanity's fault. The
alarmist U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that the fraction of global warming caused by humans might not be much more than one-half, further reducing the threat of warming.
And the Green New Deal calls for far greater changes than the Paris Climate Agreement does....
...All this points to simple fact: for now, fossil fuels are the
moral choice. Mandated reliance on expensive solar and wind energy in the U.S. would
make our lives much harder and would make energy much more expensive, hurting poor people the most. And there would be
no measurable impact on global temperatures in our, or our grandchildren's, lifetimes....