Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
If you think Bernie Sanders’ plan to tear apart the healthcare industry and impose socialized medicine on 300 million Americans is a good idea, you’re going to love his plan to take over the energy industry.
Sanders, who employs totalitarian communists as state organizers, as The New American has reported, wants to nationalize energy production and destroy the oil and gas industries.
The plan to Venezuelize the United States is laid out in detail on his website, but Sanders has been pushing it earnestly as he campaigns.
$16T Plan
The latest on the Sanders plan comes from Politico, which reports that Sanders might have “put nationalizing health insurance at the center of his presidential campaign, but his proposal to fight climate change also calls for a government takeover of a fundamental segment of the economy — electricity production.”
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
The plan would use existing Power Marketing Administrations, agencies within the Department of Energy used to sell generated power, relics of socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, to end private ownership of energy production with a maze of rules and regulations.
A low-end and completely unrealisticly positive estimate shows it would take at least $16 trillion to get rid of fossil-fuel electricity generation and move to solar power, hydropower, and windmills. A close look at the nuts and bolts of such a plan indicates the real cost would dwarf the $16 trillion estimate.
Critics aren’t so sure wrecking the private production of electricity is a bright idea, and that whoever suggested it might well be something of a dim bulb, Politico reported:
“What the Sanders proposal would do is create an 800-pound federally owned power gorilla that would make it very hard for the existing generators to compete,” said Josh Freed, head of energy and climate policy at Third Way, a centrist think tank that opposes the Sanders plan. “I think a plan like this could turn off voters in large parts of the country. It would have challenges in Pennsylvania, Michigan — a lot of the states that are competitive for the election.”
The Details
Not that a project being palpably ridiculous and doomed to fail ever stopped a collectivist from trying to implement it, particularly Soviet apologist Sanders.
The mindboggling plan’s main points are these, with the plan to nationalize energy production buried in the details:
• “Transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to 100 percent energy efficiency and sustainable energy by 2030 at the latest.”
• Add one more power marketing administration to the existing four to “build more than enough wind, solar, energy storage and geothermal power plants. We will spend $1.52 trillion on renewable energy and $852 billion to build energy storage capacity.”
• “We will end greed in our energy system. The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal will be publicly owned, managed by the Federal Power Marketing Administrations, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Tennessee Valley Authority and sold to distribution utilities with a preference for public power districts, municipally- and cooperatively-owned utilities with democratic, public ownership, and other existing utilities that demonstrate a commitment to the public interest.”
• Spend “$526 billion on a modern, high-volt, underground, renewable, direct current, smart, electric transmission and distribution grid … [to] ensure our transition to 100 percent sustainable energy is safe and smooth.”
• Set aside “$2.18 trillion for sliding-scale grants for low- and moderate-income families and small businesses to invest in weatherizing and retrofitting their homes and businesses.”
• “Phase out the use of non-sustainable sources. This plan will stop the building of new nuclear power plants … [and] enact a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States to protect surrounding communities.”
• “Declare a climate emergency,” which is “an existential threat and we will do whatever it takes to confront it.”
• “Fully electrify and decarbonize our transportation sector. We will create a federal grant and zero-emission vehicle program to create a 100 percent renewable transportation sector. … Provide $2.09 trillion in grants to low- and moderate-income families and small businesses to trade in their fossil fuel-dependent vehicles for new electric vehicles.”
• “To ensure that no one is ever stranded without the ability to charge their vehicle, we will spend $85.6 billion building a national electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”
• Set aside “$407 billion in grants for states to help school districts and transit agencies replace all school and transit buses with electric buses.”
• Spend “$216 billion to replace all diesel tractor trailer trucks with fast-charging and long-range electric trucks.”
• Fund a “$607 billion investment in a regional high-speed rail system [that] would complete the vision of the Obama administration to develop high-speed intercity rail in the United States.”
• “Invest in decarbonizing the shipping and aviation industries as soon as possible. The science is clear that the entire global economy must decarbonize by 2050 at latest if we hope to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.”
Actually, the science isn’t “clear,” but anyway, Sanders has said, “We have all of 12 years to significantly cut carbon emissions or else they will be irreparable damage to the United States and countries all over the world.” That claims doesn’t square with his predicted date of 2050 for “the worst impacts of climate change.” Plus, China and India are building coal-fired power plants faster than similar plants are being removed elsewhere in the world, and Sanders doesn’t tell us how he will force those countries not to use their new power plants. (Hint: He won’t stop them, and carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to rise unabated.
And how he would force Americans to along with this patently insane idea.
His campaign staffers provided the answer: Gulags and execution for resisters and dissenters.
Photo: narvikk / iStock / Getty Images Plus
