Biden's new climate strategy: Stay home

Townhall Media

Last month, to little fanfare, the Biden administration released yet another “climate plan” to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, save the world, or whatever. It was a joint effort by the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Transportation Department. Shockingly, as the Free Beacon points out, Team Biden actually came up with something nice to say about the pandemic. The government-mandated lockdowns show us some “major opportunities” to reduce emissions, particularly from vehicles. That’s right. Far fewer people were driving (because you weren’t allowed to go anywhere) and look how well that worked out for our carbon footprint! Maybe we should do that again! So Uncle Joe wants everyone to reduce their “commuting miles.” But how will we do that? With remote work and virtual engagements, of course.

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The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t all bad, a new Biden administration plan to fight climate change argues: It at least “highlighted major opportunities” to reduce travel demand and lower carbon emissions through “remote work and virtual interactions.”

The plan—which President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency and Energy, Transportation, and Housing departments released in January—aims to “eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas emissions” from the transportation sector by 2050, mostly through a transition to electric vehicles. Also included in the plan, however, is a controversial call to reduce “commuting miles” through “an increase in remote work and virtual engagements,” including in education.

Make sure you read the last part of the final sentence of that excerpt carefully. Yes, they’re talking about working remotely and using Zoom calls or similar technology to hold meetings. But they added the phrase “including in education.”

Has anyone on Joe Biden’s team been paying any attention to the news for the past year? The school closures during the lockdown were disastrous for students. (And they were pretty hard on many parents as well, of course.) Students’ educational achievements cratered. Their emotional development was stunted. High school grades and graduation rates dropped, along with college admissions.

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And now Joe Biden is pushing to have more of that “remote learning” make a comeback in the name of climate change? Have we learned nothing from the past three years? One thing we definitely learned was that children were at the lowest risk of bad outcomes from COVID, so the schools were probably the last places we should have shut down.

I can’t shake the feeling that this brings us one step closer to a declared “climate emergency.” You people can all stay locked down in your homes voluntarily to save the polar bears or we can declare an emergency and lock you down like we did during COVID.

That probably sounds like tinfoil hat territory to some of you, but is it really? Back during the early days of the lockdowns, social distancing rules and the rest of the madness, I was warning people about this. The executive powers, unchecked by the legislature, swell during a declared state of emergency. And for people with certain personality types, that kind of power can be addictive. Sadly, those are exactly the personality types that tend to flock toward political office. So if they are sad when the emergency ends because they are compelled to move back toward regular order, what’s an aspiring autocrat to do? They come up with a new emergency of course.

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Never trust these people further than you could throw them. And never take your eyes off of them, either.

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