Month: May 2022

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 25, 2022

Commentary

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting their own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope that no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true, makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts.  If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, and E.J. Antoni is a research fellow in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis. Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, where Antoni is a senior fellow.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.

MOORE: When the people tasked with protecting our children are the villains

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 24, 2022

Commentary

An empty classroom where all his students have been confined due to Coronavirus infection in a public school in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. On Friday Spanish authorities said that nearly 25,000, or 4.3% of the country's teachers were on medical leave and that over 260,000 of 8.2 million students had been told to isolate since classes resumed in the new year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The evidence shows that school closures during COVID were an epic public policy blunder. The school lockdowns in many states were arguably the most significant episode of government-sponsored child abuse in American history.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Last week, the liberal New York Times came to the same conclusion after an extensive investigation. The New York Times found:

“Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020. In places where schools re-opened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed.”

The New York Times also found that the primary victims were the lowest-income children. Wealthy families found education alternatives for their children either in their homes or private schools. Children from low-income families barely participated in online lessons.

“This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” said Thomas Kane, an author of a Harvard study on the disparate impact of the COVID lockdowns.

The study also found that most of these school closures occurred “in major cities, which tend to be run by Democratic officials … Republicans were generally quicker to reopen schools. High-poverty schools are also more likely to have unionized teachers, and some unions lobbied for remote schooling.” And all this time, you probably thought Democrats were the party that cares about children.

But there are other villains as well that need to be exposed. Who did this to our children?

The teachers unions were probably the most shameful player, the worm in the education apple. Even after months of evidence that in-class instruction posed virtually no danger to children or teachers, they wouldn’t teach. They treated COVID as a paid vacation, even as private and Catholic schools down the street were open. In September of last year, nearly 90% of the Chicago teachers even voted to go on strike after not teaching for six months.

They weren’t the only ones in on the crime against our nation’s children. Let’s not forget about the inexcusable role of the American Academy of Pediatrics. This group of children’s doctors originally called for entire school openings for the 2020-21 school year. That was based on science.

But then, politics intervened. Two weeks later, the group did a sudden 180-degree reversal and joined in solidarity with the teachers unions calling for closing schools. They even signed joint statements with the unions.

It’s not hard to understand why the pediatricians pulled the rug out from beneath our children. Every study has shown that pediatricians are politically liberal and more so than any other medical group.

Pediatricians were regularly on TV or elsewhere in the news, falsely spooking parents about the dangers of sending children to school. It was propaganda — the big lie.

What is so chilling and unforgivable about this tale is that teachers and pediatricians are the people entrusted by parents and society at large to care for and educate children. They are supposed to have our sons’ and daughters’ best interests at stake regarding their health and well-being. But they selfishly put politics and paychecks ahead of child welfare.

So Democratic politicians, teachers unions and pediatricians formed an alliance to deny our children schooling. These are the people who sanctimoniously lecture us about the necessity of “following the science.” Yet they ignored it. They peddled fear, not facts, and perhaps Biden’s new ministry of “misinformation” might want to investigate them.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: “Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”

Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Think Public Schools Are Headed in the Wrong Direction—and for Good Reason

By Charlotte Allen, The Epoch Times April 12, 2022 Updated: April 14, 2022

Commentary

In late March, the polling firm Selzer & Co. released the astonishing results of a nationwide survey of U.S. adults: Nearly two-thirds of them said they believed that U.S. public schools are headed in the wrong direction in what they teach children. Only 24 percent said they thought public schools are headed in the right direction.

The 64 percent negative majority held across sex, race, economic, and educational lines. Two-thirds of men, nearly two-thirds of women, 64 percent of whites, and 63 percent of nonwhites thought public schools were on the wrong track. Some 67 percent of people sharing homes with children younger than age 18 agreed. The only serious disparity fell along party lines: 83 percent of Republicans polled responded that they thought public schools were headed in the wrong direction, compared with 44 percent of Democrats (still a plurality).

This is a serious crisis of confidence in the public school system. As The Hill magazine pointed out, for years “teachers held political sway and successfully campaigned for raises even in deep-red states.” Whether teachers had actually been underpaid was arguable, but the fact remains that just four or five years ago, they were securing substantial boosts in salaries seemingly based on their perceived contributions to society.

Furthermore, polls consistently showed that majorities of parents had rated their children’s teachers as “excellent” or “good,” even though those ratings had been trending downward since the 1970s. Now educators are in the doghouse as far as the public is concerned.

What happened? I’m going to offer some suggestions. On March 8, the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, which forbids classroom “instruction” or “discussion” about sexual orientation and gender identities in grades K–3 and applies age-appropriate restrictions in higher grades. A few weeks later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the measure into law. The legislation, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” and similar measures pending in other states set off a nationwide furor among progressive politicians, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream media pundits, and, especially, public-school teachers in Florida and elsewhere.

The teachers began voicing their opinions in media interviews and in TikTok videos—and what the videos revealed was that a significant number of teachers wanted to talk about their own sexual identities to the youngsters that they were supposed to be teaching.

The most shocking of the media presentations featured Florida kindergarten teacher Cory Bernaert in an MSNBC interview on March 29. The openly gay Bernaert was distressed that he wouldn’t be able to “build relationships” with the 5-year-olds in his classroom by talking about his “home life” and off-hours recreational activities.

“I don’t want to have to hide that my partner and I went paddleboarding this weekend,” Bernaert said.

Watching the MSNBC video, I thought: What? When my peers and I were in kindergarten—and right up through high school—we never spent a single minute wondering about our teachers’ home lives and much less did we want to hear about them. As far as we were concerned, teachers, love them or hate them, were abstract authority figures who had no connection with our own personal lives. We never thought about what they did outside school, and we certainly had no desire to “build relationships” with them, much less share stories about how we spent our weekends.

Another Florida teacher used TikTok to reveal her “really sneaky” strategy for getting around the “specifically Christian” parents of her students who might object: Paste a pink triangle, the Nazi concentration-camp badge for homosexuals, somewhere in your classroom, and the students will get the message, she said. A fourth-grade teacher disclosed his own nonverbal approach to communicating LGBTQ identity: Wearing rainbow socks and slapping a pink-and-blue transgender flag onto his laptop. Another teacher vowed to defy the Florida law and dared school officials to fire her.

It’s impossible to think that watching these classroom exhibitionists display their interest in sending secret signals about sexuality to children hasn’t had an effect on parents. On April 7, the Alabama legislature voted overwhelmingly to make it a felony for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones or to perform gender-transition surgery for people younger than age 19. And at least a dozen states have legislation pending that mimics Florida’s.

A March 11–14 poll of registered voters conducted by Politico/Morning Consult found majorities supporting both a ban on classroom teaching about sexual and gender identity through grade three and age-appropriate limitations after that. This despite nonstop propaganda opposing such restrictions from the media, the educational establishment, and the progressive elite, from President Joe Biden on down.

All this comes on top of the educational establishment taking a similar anti-parent stance on teaching the tenets of critical race theory (CRT)—the idea that white people are racist by nature and that “systemic racism” and “white privilege” permeate every aspect of American life. Nonetheless, parental revulsion against the promotion of this ideology in public schools has led to a nationwide grassroots rebellion against CRT-promoting school boards—and the election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia in November 2021 after he ran on a promise that parents, not self-proclaimed educational experts, would have ultimate control over their children’s education. Meanwhile, 36 states have passed or introduced legislation banning the promotion of CRT in schools.

Adding to that are alarming statistics about setbacks in student progress brought about by most public schools’ insistence—at the behest of teachers unions—on shutting down classrooms and subjecting students to remote learning for months on end during the COVID-19 crisis. U.S. children fell at least four months behind in their academic progress, according to a McKinsey & Co. report released on April 4, and the gap was undoubtedly higher for lower-income kids.

Another survey released by Politico in conjunction with Harvard University on March 25 indicated that roughly 40 percent of parents believe that masking school-age children, another priority item for teachers unions, has harmed their offspring’s scholastic process.

Not surprisingly, private-school enrollment is spiking across America, as is homeschooling by parents themselves. At least 10 states have experienced an erosion in public school enrollment from 2019 to 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic is obviously partly to blame. But the Selzer poll in March indicates that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that something is seriously wrong with the way the public school system itself is heading.

That should give pause to the media and the educational establishment that are so eager to dismiss parents and their concerns.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.