Unless your idea of good government and an ideal society is totalitarianism, the Green New Deal (GND) has nothing to recommend it.

As I argued in CCW 313, it would be physically impossible to reach the goals set in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-MA) socialist GND—a plan to do nothing less than remake the entire economy, sans fossil fuels, while promising full employment, living wages, free health care, and cheap energy from the Heavens for everyone in just over 10 years—and heck, why not throw in the promise of a chicken in every pot (except for vegetarians and vegans, of course), as well?

Even if the GND’s goals weren’t impossible to obtain within the time allotted, every credible economic analysis I’ve seen shows its costs would be so high that imposing it would be extremely undesirable. Early estimates indicate the GND would cost nearly $50 trillion in its first 10 years.

Settling aside the cost of transforming the transportation system and refurbishing the entire stock of housing and commercial structures in the United States, the American Enterprise Institute’s Ben Zycher has calculated the cost of decarbonizing the electric power system and meeting GND’s social welfare provisions, such as universal health care and free college tuition for everyone, will cost nearly $9 trillion dollars per year, when the political negotiations are all over.

The American Action Forum calculated GND could cost as much as $93 trillion dollars, or approximately $671,010 per household of four, through 2029.

The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of GND makes it look positively cheap by comparison. Heritage calculated only the costs of the energy portion of GND, estimating the taxes and regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions would result in “a peak employment shortfall of over 1.4 million jobs; a total income loss of more than $40,000 for a family of four; [and] an aggregate gross domestic product loss of over $3.9 trillion, by 2024.”

Perhaps recognizing the foolishness of actually attempting to foist this steaming pile of “legislation” on voters, when Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) brought GND up for a vote in the Senate on March 26, not a single senator voted in favor of the bill. Even its authors and cosponsors voted “present” instead of yes.

This ignominious defeat, however, has not stopped more than 100 Democrat or Independent members of the U.S. House and Senate from cosponsoring or publicly endorsing GND, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kristen Gillibrand (R-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—almost every senator currently vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Because, for reasons inexplicable to me, GND remains a talking point on the campaign trail and in Congress, my colleague and friend James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, has written a detailed takedown of the proposal. Although Taylor provides an excellent discussion of GND’s economic costs, the portion of his paper I would like to focus on is the terrible environmental toll GND would impose on wildlife and wildlands in the United States and around the world without increasing governments’ abilities to control the climate.

Taylor writes, “Even if one accepts the dubious and alarming U.N. estimates regarding the temperature impact of CO2 emissions … if America were to immediately and completely eliminate all of its CO2 emissions, it would only mitigate less than two-tenths of a degree C[elsius] of global temperature increase by the end of the century, an amount that’s too small to be measured accurately.”

On the environmental front, Taylor calculates “replacing all existing conventional power plants with wind and solar power would require consuming an amount of land larger than the size of California, … an unprecedented assault on land conservation and the world’s greatest threat to biodiversity.”

A 2013 Wildlife Society Bulletin documented that although wind turbines produce just 1 percent of U.S. electricity, they already kill at least 1.4 million birds and bats each year, including many endangered and protected species. Taylor writes, “subsequent analyses found the death toll [of the Green New Deal] is likely 10–20 times greater than the 1.4 million estimate. If accurate, those estimates indicate dramatically increasing wind power could result in the slaughter of more than 100 million birds and bats each year.”

And that’s just the birds and bats. Because habitat loss is the biggest cause of species’ decline, placing industrial wind and solar facilities across the nation would result in the displacement and deaths of millions of animals of other species.

In addition, both wind and solar power require substantial amounts of rare earth elements, the mining, and refining of which produces millions of tons of toxic waste each year. Taylor writes, “An organization called Environmental Progress found solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear power plants.”

Do you care about the environment? How about the health of the U.S. economy and your own bank account? If so, you should work with The Heartland Institute to bury the Green New Deal, and put politicians who support it into forced retirement.

Source: https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/socialist-green-new-deal-threatens-freedom-prosperity-and-the-environment

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Mike Pompeo said that once North Korea achieves the ability to mass-produce nuclear weapons — estimated at sometime in the near future — it could spur other countries to want the same capability. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Pompeo says the U.S. is working overtime to prevent Pyongyang from selling weapons and transferring missile technology.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community was concerned that a cash-starved and expansionist North Korea could sell its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology to other countries, including Iran, and that failure to uncover such transfers could trigger a global nuclear arms race.

Pompeo’s comments came in response to a question about whether Tehran could use its existing cooperation agreements with North Korea to clandestinely advance its own nuclear weapons program without being discovered by the United States or the international enforcers of the 2016 six-party Iran nuclear deal. One option: sending its scientists to Pyongyang to obtain advanced training, or even warhead designs.

“These are terribly difficult problems in incredibly tight spaces, and when you are moving information, it is sometimes difficult to detect that that information has moved,” Pompeo said of such technology transfers. “So if someone asks me as the senior intelligence leader of the CIA, can you guarantee this [would be uncovered], I would say absolutely not.”

Pompeo said the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were working overtime to prevent that. They are also scrambling to provide President Donald Trump with options to contain North Korea’s broader nuclear ambitions, he said, and in a way that doesn’t escalate the already intensifying confrontation into open warfare.

One of his biggest concerns, Pompeo said, is that once North Korea achieves the ability to mass-produce nuclear weapons — estimated at sometime in the near future — it could spur other countries that have resisted such efforts to want the same capability.

“One of the risks of allowing the North Korean regime to continue to have this nuclear capability is this proliferation risk, that this technology they have developed and then figured out how to manufacture … would then be proliferated elsewhere in the world,” Pompeo said. “And, secondarily, it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that if they continue to have that nuclear weapons system, and if the Iranians make advances in theirs, that many other countries around the world will decide me too, that I want to have one of those things that that guy has.”

Pompeo said he couldn’t identify countries that U.S. officials believe might be susceptible to wanting to join the nuclear club. “But you can go through a list” of likely suspects, he said.

Several former U.S. officials familiar with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program said Pompeo’s acknowledgment of the proliferation threat — and the timing of it — was significant.

“They need to raise money wherever they can, and if they are perceived as having a valuable and reliable nuclear weapons technology or ballistic missile technology or cybertechnology, there is going to be a market for that, especially with the increase in global instability,” said one recently departed senior U.S. intelligence official.

That global instability “opens up seams” of opportunity for North Korea and other rogue nations to engage in illicit weapons transfers, especially given the lack of effective international efforts to counter them, the former official said. “I would agree that there is real opportunity now for North Korea to put itself on the market.”

Vann Van Diepen, who spent 25 years as a top U.S. counterproliferation official, said the illicit transfer of nuclear weapons technology has been a grave global security threat for decades, especially since the Pakistani metallurgist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was caught selling Pakistan’s uranium enrichment capability to North Korea, Iran and Libya in 2003.

North Korea has been actively selling sophisticated military technology, including ballistic missile know-how, since long before that. Moreover, in 2007, the Israeli military bombed a suspected North Korean nuclear reactor in Syria that the United States believed would produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Given that North Korea’s economy has been crippled by international sanctions, “there is certainly the possibility that they could decide to sell nuclear materials, or nuclear weapons for money,” said Van Diepen, who worked at the State Department and in intelligence community. He retired in 2016 after seven years as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation.

Van Diepen said Pompeo’s remarks were significant for several reasons. The CIA director, he said, seemed to be suggesting that a nuclear arms race could be triggered by the actual sale or transfer of weapons technology, or simply by other countries suddenly feeling threatened as never before by Pyongyang’s recent nuclear provocations, or future ones from Iran.

“In a way, he’s provided for both. The first argument is that if they get more of it, that they’ll be prepared to sell it,” Van Diepen said of North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. “He also seems to be saying that if they grow their own program and potentially sell to others, it could lead others to want one. That’s what is known as a proliferation cascade.”

The most obvious countries to want nuclear weapons under such circumstances, Van Diepen and others said, would be Japan, South Korea and other neighbors of North Korea, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries threatened by Iran.

In his remarks, the CIA director forcefully defended the U.S. intelligence community against recent accusations that it missed North Korea’s rapid advancement in its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them onto U.S. targets.

But Pompeo’s acknowledgement that U.S. spies could easily miss the transfer of nuclear weapons technology from North Korea to other nations was both noteworthy and accurate, according to Van Diepen.

“A discreet transaction would be extremely hard to detect,” Van Diepen said. “Selling one nuclear weapon, it could easily be concealed in a freight container. And the technology could fit on a thumb drive.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/pompeo-cia-north-korea-nuclear-race-364178

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