Inflation continues to put pressure on Americans' budgets, the Federal Reserve just hiked interest rates to a 22-year high, and the Treasury Department continues to indulge the radical Left's climate activists demanding that the world achieve a "net-zero" economy.
On Thursday, Treasury announced that Secretary Janet Yellen appointed Ethan Zindler "to serve as the Treasury Department's new Climate Counselor," a role in which "Mr. Zindler will lead the Treasury Climate Hub, report directly to and advise the Secretary on a broad range of climate matters, and be charged with leading Treasury's efforts to facilitate and unlock the financing needed for investments to achieve a net-zero economy at home and abroad." That goal, however, is not attainable at home or abroad.
This new Climate Change Counselor has a legacy, on Twitter at least, of demanding more attention on climate change in addition to calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a "national hero," attacking former President Donald Trump, and self-identifying as a former "Clinton person." But he also said that China's President Xi Jinping managed to "upstage" President Joe Biden at the U.N. in 2021.
Yellen says Zindler's position will be "essential in the Department's work as we implement key components of the Inflation Reduction Act, further spur on historic clean energy investments across the United States, and work internationally to help countries meet their own climate goals," despite the fact that several of the world's worst polluters have little to zero interest in complying with regulations that will limit development and cause economic issues for their citizens.
Overtly signaling her climate virtue, Yellen said that the "threat of climate change has been something that I've spoken about for decades, and it's something that we increasingly see in our daily lives."
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"I believe it is imperative that we continue to take decisive action to fight climate change, for the sake of our planet and for the benefit of the global economy," insisted Yellen as part of her work toward "building an inclusive clean energy economy," whatever that means.
The goal of becoming a "net-zero" country by 2050 — while trying to bully foreign countries who have no interest in ruining their economies to achieve a gold star from woke climate activists — was set by President Biden when he dragged the U.S. back into the Paris climate agreement. When you hear Biden, his Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, or others in the administration talk about the "energy transition," net-zero is what they're talking about.
But the technologies and abilities to achieve the net-zero goal being pursued by the Biden administration and a not-insignificant number of large entities that have bought into ESG — environmental, social and governance — policies don't exist, are untested or have already failed to perform as those pushing "decarbonization" promised they would.
In The Wall Street Journal, Junk Science founder Steve Milloy noted that even entities within the U.S. government have admitted the "transition" to a net-zero America — the thing now being doubled-down on by the Treasury Department — is already moving into unsustainable territory.
After Biden took office and began instituting his climate agenda, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released a report from its perch as "the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry," which concluded "that the utility industry can't attain net zero."
"This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency...are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions," Milloy sampled from the EPRI report.
"In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050," noted Milloy. The EPRI report said that to even get close to net-zero — referred to as "deep decarbonization" — would require "low-carbon fuels" that Milloy reminded "don't exist."
From Milloy's WSJ piece:
But “low-carbon fuels”—efficient biofuels—don’t exist. “Carbon removal technologies” aren’t possible to scale up, and if they were, it would cost about $1 quadrillion—a million billion dollars—at today’s prices to remove the 1.6 trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said needs to be sucked “out of the atmosphere even after we get to net zero.”
Another review of "long-term reliability" conducted in December 2022 by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) — "a government-certified grid-reliability and standard-setting group," according to Milloy — "concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather."
Indeed. As Townhall reported in June of 2022, NERC's spring analysis found that "Californians, plus millions more Americans who find themselves in the elevated risk zone — nearly everyone living west of the Mississippi River — face energy emergencies during what NERC calls "extreme conditions" such as droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires" while "Americans in the high risk zone — including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and portions of Michigan, Illinois, Arkansas, and Louisiana — face power disruptions during both extreme conditions as well as normal summer conditions."
Since then, Biden and his whole-of-government push for unattainable net-zero have continued their war on American energy by attempting to put coal-fired plants out of operation through bureaucratic regulations implemented without the consent of Congress. Biden has lost on some fronts in his climate crusade before the Supreme Court, but it's clear that he's not letting something as apparently trivial to him as the U.S. Constitution get in the way.
Now, even Treasury is wrapped up and diving deeper into the net-zero mayhem by bringing aboard a "Climate Change Counselor." He can counsel all he wants, but he can't change reality. Unfortunately, such pursuits will continue to bring damage to the U.S. economy and more hardship for Americans already facing high prices — thanks, in part, to the falsely named "Inflation Reduction Act," which was a Trojan horse for climate policies — and less reliable energy.
