It’s only been a few weeks since President Trump became the 47th POTUS and already he is getting to work implementing his vision for the United States. This, as expected, has caused many on the left side of the aisle to return to their old tricks. Put another way, if you spend any amount of time on apps like X and TikTok, you will be bombarded by liberals from all over the Western world claiming that America is now a neo-fascist ethnostate, that women should read The Handmaid’s Tale so that they can learn to live under this new dictatorship, and—most hilarious of all—that our planet will not survive the next four years unless Donald Trump is removed from office.
Honing in on this third topic—environmental alarmism—most of the outrage seems to be primarily directed at President Trump’s executive orders regarding energy production, the highlights of which include rapid deregulation of drilling in places like Alaska, pausing leases for projects that expand wind energy in federal waters, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and last, but not least, signing an order revoking a 2021 order “that set a goal for 50% of US vehicle sales to be electric by 2030.”
But are these executive orders actually cause for concern, or rather, are they a significant step in the right direction?
For some preliminary context, what left-wing environmentalists are worried about more than anything is the greenhouse effect. Essentially, when it comes to the greenhouse effect, this is a three-part process that results in heat energy from the sun getting trapped in our atmosphere, thus warming the planet to unnatural, and possibly detrimental levels. First, light energy from the sun passes through our atmosphere (only about 50 percent of it reaches the surface) and is then absorbed by the surface. Second, about 90 percent of that absorbed light energy is then radiated back out via infrared heat energy. Third, this infrared heat—which would normally pass easily through the atmosphere and back out into space—becomes trapped in the atmosphere because increased levels of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and excess water vapor), have filled that atmosphere to unnatural levels, thus causing that trapped energy to heat the entire planet like a greenhouse.
Since the burning of fossil fuels is the greatest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, things like coal, oil, and, most recently, household appliances, have become big, bad bogeymen who hide under environmental activist’s beds all across the First World. This is why these people are, in many ways, obsessed with “renewable energy.” Are they right?
The short answer is no. The long answer, though, is that—assuming man-made greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are, in fact, a great threat to our world—things like electric cars and windmills (the environmentalists’ go-to solvents) are laughable solutions. To explain, electric cars actually cause more carbon emissions over their lifetime than modern combustion engines. The reasons for this are as follows:
1) 99.9 percent of electric vehicles in the world are charged with energy that comes from coal plants and, because of this, they release 74 percent more carbon than their combustion brothers and sisters because of their batteries.
2) 100 percent of electric car batteries require rare earth mineral mining—a process that not only displaces and disrupts acres upon acres of natural ecosystems (agricultural development accounts for 24 percent of global carbon emissions) but is also one that requires complex factories that run on more coal.
When it comes to renewable energy sources like windmills, as stated above, agricultural land development accounts for 24 percent of global carbon emissions. To that end, ignoring the fact that vegetables require much more land than “cow farts”—another major concern of the environmentalists’ who hate fossil fuels—windmills in particular require 300 times the space nuclear plants do to create the same amount of energy. Plus, as the new administration correctly states, the windmills are ugly and kill the birds (and now whales apparently).
The moral of the story is that the environmentalists’ go-to answers to greenhouse gas emissions are, to put it plainly, silly, inefficient, and ultimately unscientific. Still, be that as it may, what would be a good solution to greenhouse gas emissions, assuming they are an existential issue?
Even though those aforementioned climate activists will hate this answer, though they can never seem to articulate why, nuclear energy is an excellent option that takes up very little space (1/300th of “green energy sources”) and is extremely clean (0 percent carbon emissions). Furthermore, it can be used in cargo/merchant ships, which account for nearly 50 percent of our carbon emissions annually.
All in all, no matter how great it is or how much you love it, renewable energy can’t sustain our nation or planet at its current state of development and likely won’t ever be able to. Plus, it isn’t really all that green to begin with. And let’s not forget that a lot of African slave labor is required to make the components for this green, renewable energy. Something that should concern liberty lovers everywhere.
For now, our only answer when it comes to sustaining ourselves in an energized world, while also making America energy independent, is fossil fuels, something President Trump is planning on giving us in droves. At least that is what his executive orders last week forecasted.
As a closing point, none of what was discussed above speaks to President Trump’s executive order removing us from the Paris Climate Agreement. To be honest, if you think that ridiculous farce of an agreement is worth the $1 trillion taxpayer, look into China’s behavior. The fact that they are able to blow the entire world out of the proverbial water regarding C02 emissions is proof that the Paris Climate Agreement—and all of these climate summits full of pretentious, statist, private-jet-flying hypocrites for that matter—is a giant bureaucratic waste of time. Open up the free market for energy, “drill baby drill,” and go nuclear.
