The Other McCain

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‘Sundown Joe’ Babbles Incoherently About Fracking in CNN Pennsylvania Town Hall

Posted on | September 18, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

The first thing you have to understand about this is, the question Joe got here was scripted in advance — from a union official, pitching an underhand softball question to the candidate he supports — and that Biden’s response was also scripted. But as Ed Morrissey points out, Biden was tripping all over himself trying to answer:

TOM CALPIN, BUSINESS AGENT FOR IRONWORKS UNION: Good evening Mr. Vice President, Mr. Cooper. With the abundance of natural gas in northeast Pennsylvania. Do you support the continuation of fracking safely and with proper guidelines, of course, and growing the industry (INAUDIBLE) additional jobs to our region?
BIDEN: Yes, I do. I do. In addition to that, we can provide for right now as you know, for thousands of uncapped wells because a lot of companies gone out of business, whether they’re gas or oil facilities, we can put to work right away 250,000 people from iron workers and other disciplines, making union wages. Capping those wells that are leaking methane and their danger to the community.
And so, not only do I continue to support it. Jobs, it’s an important for this community. It’s important for Pennsylvania, and Ohio and other states. It’s an important, it’s an important business. And it’s a lot of wages are involved in that. But beyond that, beyond that, we can also get people working now, capping the wells that are left uncapped right now across this region and all the way there’s hundreds of thousands of them all across the nation. And that put a lot of people to work.

[CNN’s ANDERSON] COOPER: Let me just follow up on that. You said you won’t ban fracking but did you wanted to gradually move away from it ultimately. It sounds like to some of you’re trying to have it both ways that that I mean, politically, it’s understandable why you might say that but it — if fracking contributes to climate change, and climate change is an existential threat. Why should it fracking continue at all?
BIDEN: Well, fracking has to continue because we have transition, we’re going to get to net zero emissions by 2050. And we’ll get to net zero power admissions by 2035. But there’s no rationale to eliminate right now fracking, number one. Number two, those jobs that are out there, whether it’s a IBW (ph) worker, or whether it’s an iron worker, or a steel worker. What I’m proposing is that, you know, when Trump thinks about global warming, he thinks hoax. When I hear global warming, I think jobs. What I’m going to make sure we do is we could transition in a way for example. We’re going to build 500 — the reason why all these unions have endorsed me is that they know my position, that I’m going to make sure that we have 500,000 charging stations in our highways so we can all the electric car market, creating a million jobs and we can lead the world. And in Detroit, we can lead the world and making sure we move to electric vehicles
As president of United States, I’ll have one of the largest fleets — we spent $600 billion a year federal money for federal contracts, I got to make sure they’re all those contracts are all products made in America, including the chain that provides for every one of those products. I’m going to do away with the tax break that the President gave people who send jobs abroad, to make sure that if you in fact, have a contract, if you with taxpayers my money, you must use American products, you must buy American products, and you must not be in a position where you’re exporting. We have 25 — we have over 50% more people moving jobs overseas as a consequence of these contracts, so it’s all backwards. And this is going to provide a lot of good paying jobs for people in the trades.

 

God have pity on whoever’s job it was to transcribe Biden’s words here, but beyond the problem of his mangled syntax, the position that Biden was trying to describe makes no sense at all. He is claiming that he can “create” jobs by destroying the energy industry. If you believe what Biden says (and I don’t think you should but never mind), there are lots of union-wage jobs to be had by capping old wells that leak methane gas.

Question: Is President Trump against capping old wells?

Whatever the answer to that question might be, you see that Biden is only making this claim as a defense against the obvious implication of the Democrats policy against fossil-fuel production. Democrats want to eliminate all U.S. petroleum, coal and natural gas production, which would obviously be bad for miners in Pennsylvania, so in order to pretend that their “green energy” utopia won’t kill jobs, Biden makes this claim about jobs to be “created” by capping old wells.

“Net zero emissions by 2050” — by which time Biden will almost certainlty have been dead for more than 20 years. See how this works? You set a goal for some distant future point, so that it is basically impossible to measure your “progress” toward that goal in any meaningful way. The economic damage inflicted by your job-killing policies is immediate, whereas the alleged benefit of these policies is over the horizon somewhere. You are quite deliberately destroying a very valuable sector of the U.S. economy — real dollars paying for real people to produce real products — in order to pander to an autistic Swedish teenager and the rest of the climate-change panic brigade.

Only a fool could support such a policy, and Democrats nominated a fool.




 

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One Response to “‘Sundown Joe’ Babbles Incoherently About Fracking in CNN Pennsylvania Town Hall”

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