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Kamala Harris Would Be A Total Disaster For American Energy

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Carla Sands

 

President Dwight Eisenhower once declared that “pessimism never won any battle.” Yet, many Americans are understandably pessimistic these days.

Families are worried about how to put gas in the tank and food on the table. Most Americans feel that the American Dream is out of reach. As our nation faces mounting challenges, our leaders need to offer a positive vision for our future that Americans can believe in.

The United States is blessed with vast energy resources that can power our economy with affordable, reliable energy. Getting the government out of the way is a good place to start unleashing American energy in a way that will reverberate throughout the economy. This is key to bringing the American Dream back within reach.

Unfortunately, today’s reality is that the Left’s apocalyptic vision of a climate crisis is the kind of pessimism that loses battles. The Biden-Harris administration’s whole-of-government war on energy perpetuates a very bleak vision of our nation’s future.

As the United States regulates hydrocarbon production out of business, our manufacturing jobs move abroad and we become reliant on foreign sources of energy. This not only harms our economic and national security, but these foreign sources also fail to meet our stringent environmental standards for production at home.

Instead of producing abundant American energy, we look to OPEC+ for hydrocarbons and increase our dependence on China for needed critical mineral production. Meanwhile, China emits more greenhouse gasses than all developed nations combined.

The Paris Agreement, which President Joe Biden rejoined, has the United States pay Beijing, even as they continue to increase emissions. At home, American standards of living move backward; the government limits everything from what kind of car we can drive to what kind of stove we can cook on. Air-conditioning and air travel become accessible only to the rich.

This is a far cry from delivering the American Dream and is unpopular with voters. As a result, Vice President Kamala Harris has recently pursued an energy messaging strategy that Reuters has kindly termed “strategically ambiguous” and The Washington Post has deemed “climate silence.”

To those paying attention, the Democrat nominee’s “climate silence” is a deafening contrast to her unambiguous record of commitment to radical climate policies throughout her career.

As a senator, Harris advanced a $10 trillion Green New Deal and even supported removing the filibuster to pass it. As a 2020 presidential candidate, she proudly declared her opposition to fracking. Her current campaign disavowed this position but has failed to explain this shift. When asked in her one sit-down interview, Vice President Harris continued her strategic ambiguity, noting only that her “values haven’t changed.”

And despite public flip-flopping, her record as vice president bolsters the conclusion that her anti-energy bent is consistent. As vice president, she holds a critical role in this administration’s whole-of-government war on energy. She was the tie-breaking vote on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which supercharged inflation to give “green” handouts to corporations and pet projects. Yet her nomination acceptance speech failed to mention energy at all and mentioned climate only once in passing. This is a telling omission from the Democrat nominee.

There is a clear logic to hiding the ball as she seeks to appeal to both energy voters in Pennsylvania and her radical climate base. Further, as the Washington Post observed, Vice President Harris’s climate policies contrast with the desire “to paint a rosy picture of the future.”

The Post is correct in calling this pessimistic vision a “lose-lose” messaging issue.

This is because, at its heart, this is a lose-lose policy proposition.

Fortunately, there is a win-win policy that offers both prosperity and environmental protection. We must unleash American energy and allow all energy sources to compete on a level playing field. We must remove burdensome government barriers and allow American ingenuity and free-market principles to drive innovation.

This is positive policy with a proven track record.

In 2019, building on the incredible innovations of the shale revolution and the pro-energy policies of the Trump administration, the United States became a net energy exporter for the first time in nearly 70 years. At the same time, this country had the largest net reduction of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Throughout the Trump administration, the United States also reduced air pollution by 7%.

American energy means we can liberate ourselves and our allies from depending on nations like Russia and China. We can protect the environment and improve the lives of Americans.

Put simply, an America First approach to energy means we can embrace the spirit of the American Dream.

This is a realistic policy vision that also paints a brighter picture of our future. Americans deserve clarity, not ambiguity. They deserve the opportunity to achieve the American Dream, starting with energy freedom.

Carla Sands is a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark. She currently serves as vice chair of the Center for Energy & Environment at the America First Policy Institute.

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Daily Caller

Hegseth Planning Huge Shakeup Of Top Military Command: REPORT

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

War Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving forward with a massive shakeup of military leadership, restructuring top commands and moving the U.S. focus away from Europe and the Middle East, according to a report out Monday.

Five sources with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post the Pentagon is set to consolidate U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command into a new larger combatant command, the U.S. International Command. Other commands would be similarly consolidated, reducing the total number of combatant commands from 11 to eight. The intended restructuring is designed both to reduce the number of admirals and four star generals and refocus the U.S. military on the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, according to the sources.

The plan would be one of the most significant changes to the military’s upper echelons in decades, and the move would bring the Pentagon more directly in line with the administration’s refocusing of priorities in the recently released National Security Strategy.

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“As a matter of Department of War policy, we will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and rumored internal discussions, as well as specifics of architectural discussion or pre-decisional matters,” a War Department official told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Beyond this, any insinuation there is a divide within the Department is completely false – everyone in the Department is working to achieve the same goal under this administration.”

The Post also reports the proposal was crafted under supervision by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, at Hegseth’s request. Caine will also be sharing two alternate proposals on potential restructures.

Hegseth has been looking for ways to reduce the number of four star generals in the Armed Forces, which has roughly the same amount of generals now as during World War II.

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Paris Climate Deal Now Decade-Old Disaster

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Steve Milloy

The Paris Climate Accord was adopted 10 years ago this week. It’s been a decade of disaster that President Donald Trump is rightly trying again to end.

The stated purpose of the agreement was for countries to voluntarily cut emissions to avoid the average global temperature exceeding the (guessed at) pre-industrial temperature by 3.6°F (2°C) and preferably 2.7°F (1.5°C).

Since December 2015, the world spent an estimated $10 trillion trying to achieve the Paris goals. What has been accomplished? Instead of reducing global emissions, they have increased about 12 percent. While the increase in emissions is actually a good thing for the environment and humanity, spending $10 trillion in a failed effort to cut emissions just underscores the agreement’s waste, fraud and abuse.

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But wasting $10 trillion is only the tip of the iceberg.

The effort to cut emissions was largely based on forcing industrial countries to replace their tried-and-true fossil fuel-based energy systems with not-ready-for-prime-time wind, solar and battery-based systems. This forced transition has driven up energy costs and made energy systems less reliable. The result of that has been economy-crippling deindustrialization in former powerhouses of Germany and Britain.

And it gets worse.

European nations imagined they could reduce their carbon footprint by outsourcing their coal and natural gas needs to Russia. That outsourcing enriched Russia and made the European economy dependent on Russia for energy. That vulnerability, in turn, and a weak President Joe Biden encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

The result of that has been more than one million killed and wounded, the mass destruction of Ukraine worth more than $500 billion so far and the inestimable cost of global destabilization. Europe will have to spend hundreds of billions more on defense, and U.S. taxpayers have been forced to spend hundreds of billions on arms for Ukraine. Putin has even raised the specter of using nuclear weapons.

President Barack Obama unconstitutionally tried to impose the Paris agreement on the U.S. as an Executive agreement rather than a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. Although Trump terminated the Executive agreement during his first administration, President Joe Biden rejoined the agreement soon after taking office, pledging to double Obama’s emissions cuts pledge to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Biden’s emissions pledge was an impetus for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allocated $1.2 trillion in spending for what Trump labeled as the Green New Scam. Although Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced that spending by about $500 billion and he is trying to reduce it further through Executive action, much of that money was used in an effort to buy the 2024 election for Democrats. The rest has been and will be used to wreck our electricity grid with dangerous, national security-compromising wind, solar and battery equipment from Communists China.

Then there’s this. At the Paris climate conference in 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated quite clearly that emissions cuts by the U.S. and other industrial countries were meaningless and would accomplish nothing since the developing world’s emissions would be increasing.

Finally, there is the climate realism aspect to all this. After the Paris agreement was signed and despite the increase in emissions, the average global temperature declined during the years from 2016 to 2022, per NOAA data.

The super El Nino experienced during 2023-2024 caused a temporary temperature spike. La Nina conditions have now returned the average global temperature to below the 2015-2016 level, per NASA satellite data. The overarching point is that any “global warming” that occurred over the past 40 years is actually associated with the natural El Nino-La Nina cycle, not emissions.

The Paris agreement has been all pain and no gain. Moreover, there was never any need for the agreement in the first place. A big thanks to President Trump for pulling us out again.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.

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