Energy issues, and the Green New Deal specifically, may end up being the political death of a potential Joe Biden presidency. During his debate with President Donald J. Trump on October 22nd, former Vice President Biden embraced the idea of banning fracking and eliminating the American oil and gas industry.
That was a big mistake.
It seems like Biden has fallen for the fallacy that supporting the radical environmental agenda is good politics. He may have spent too much time in coffee shops in Delaware and on Amtrak trains to understand the financial struggle many Americans are facing. His leftist advisors may dream of a world without gas powered cars, yet most Americans in fly over America care more about cheap energy and jobs.
The polls indicate a landslide for Biden on November 3rd, yet these are the same polls that indicated Hillary Clinton was also going to win big in 2016. The reason why Hillary lost was that she fumbled away Democrats in the so called ‘Rust Belt’ when she proclaimed that she was going to shut down the coal industry.
Democrats have become the party of eliminating fossil fuels when so many Americans work in that space. They talk about ending oil and gas while adopting the left’s rhetoric of hatred of fracking. Seems nuts that Joe Biden is moderate enough to understand that he needs to pump the brakes on packing the Supreme Court, yet he has pushed all of his electoral chips in on a radical anti-energy agenda that appeals to liberal elites. Good luck finding enough latte sipping Americans who drive electric cars and have solar panel roofs on their houses to balance off the 9.8 million voters, not including their families, supported by the oil and gas industry.
In March of 2016 Clinton embraced a radical left energy policy. Clinton said, “I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." As reported in Business Insider on September 7, 2017, Clinton wrote in her book about the campaign “that her biggest regret from the campaign trail last year was saying she would put coal miners out of business.” That one comment may have cost her Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin which cost her the White House.
The polls rolling up to the 2016 election hid the signs of danger for the Clinton campaign. Five Thirty Eight projected that Hillary Clinton had about a 5 percent lead in Wisconsin, 4 percent lead in Michigan and 4 percent lead in Pennsylvania. The actual result was a 1 percent victory in Wisconsin, 0.3 percent victory in Michigan and 1 percent victory in Pennsylvania for President Donald J. Trump. The voters in these important swing states were not willing to vote for a Democrat who promised to put them out of work.
Now the issue is the Green New Deal and the specific issue of fracking has captured the Biden campaign. CNBC reported on September 8, 2020, that “Fracking spurs a rust belt rebound in manufacturing.” Fracking is popular in the states that Trump needs to flip, if you believe the polls, yet Biden has adopted a position on this issue that flips the bird to voters in these same swing states that launched Trump into the White House. Any rational campaign aid would have told Biden before the debate to avoid a comment that will alienate rust belt voters.
Democrats have gone crazy on the issue of climate change. They have adopted the radical left’s Green New Deal that promises to eliminate petroleum products like gasoline. Nick Loris of The Heritage Foundation describes the proposal as “essentially banning the internal combustion engine and transitioning to electric vehicles, high-speed rail, all of these things that are economically costly right now and will be for a very long time.” Loris points out that “the reason that 92% of our transportation needs are met through petroleum products is because they're affordable and reliable.” Loris is spot on to point out that the cost to consumers of this idea is astronomical. Middle- and low-income consumers of fossil fuels, in addition to people working in the fossil fuel industry, will be hurt badly if Biden has his way.
Sleepy Joe may get a wake-up call on Election Day thanks to his embrace during the final debate of banning fracking and eliminating the American oil and gas industry.