Let them eat solar panels

Monsieur John F. Kerry is the Harris-Biden administration’s Climate Ambassador. He is assisted in his diplomatic duties by National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy. Earlier this week they held a press briefing with the psickening Jen Psaki. I have embedded the video below. It is excruciating. The White House transcript can be read without the full effect of Kerry’s otherwise audible hauteur.

The gentleman from Madame Tussauds killed the Keystone Pipeline in the blizzard of executive orders he unleashed on Day One (White House Fact Sheet here). It was executive order 7, by Politico’s count. There is a revolution for the hell of it quality to the thing that reveals the will to power implicit in the climate charade. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal point out:

The Obama State Department found five separate times that the pipeline would have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude would still be extracted. Shipping bitumen by rail or tanker would result in 28% to 42% higher CO2 emissions and more leaks. No matter. President Obama in 2015 rejected the permit as an oblation to the Paris Climate accords.

President Trump gave the right of way, but legal challenges by anti-fossil fuel groups marooned the pipeline and ran out the clock on the Trump years. Now Mr. Biden is yanking Keystone’s permit and rejoining the Paris agreement. Neither action will matter to the climate.

Yeah, but it will kill thousands of jobs! Not so fast. Monsieur Kerry patiently explained:

With respect to those workers, no — no two people are more — in this room, are more concerned about it. And the President of the United States has expressed, in every comment he has made about climate, the need to grow the new jobs that pay better, that are cleaner, that —

I mean, you know, you look at the consequences of black lung for a miner, for instance, and measure that against the fastest-growing job in the United States before COVID was solar power technician. The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice. And similarly, you have the second-fastest-growing job pre-COVID was wind turbine technician.

This is happening. Seventy-five percent, seventy percent of all the electricity that’s come on line in the United States in the last few years came from renewables, not — you know, coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years.

So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels — that we’re making them here at home. That is going to be a particular focus of the Build Back Better agenda.

And I think that, unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative. No surprise, right? For the last few years, they’ve been fed the notion that, somehow, dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it’s not. What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.

So why the need for an executive order? I don’t find that question in the transcript.

Marie Antoinette is famously reputed to have said regarding the starving peasant of pre-revolutionary France, “Let them eat cake.” There is nevertheless no evidence she ever said it. John Kerry actually pronounced his own “Let them eat solar panels” variation on the thought. It’s right there in the White House transcript and in the excruciating White House video below.