Episode 140: The Green New Deal

In this episode, Kurt chats with Donald Kendal and Jim Lakely of the Heartland Institute concerning the Green New Deal proposal that’s been the source of recent political discussion. What is the Green New Deal and what would be its impact?

Listen to “Episode 140: The Green New Deal” on Spreaker.

Kurt: Well a good day to you. And thanks for joining us here on another episode of veracity hill, where we are striving for truth on faith, politics, and society. Very nice to be with you here. If you didn’t catch us last week, we were joined by Dr. Braxton Hunter, and we discussed his recent debate with the popular YouTube atheist video, host of the Atheist Experience, Matt Dillahunty. And that’s a fascinating learning about their debate. And if you haven’t had the opportunity, I want to encourage you to go to Braxton’s channel where he’s got the full length debate that occurred at Baylor University. And we had a lot of views from that. So thank you for those that tuned in. And today, we’re turning our attention to a political topic, which is something we haven’t had in a couple of months now. But that’s part of our program, what we do we we integrate Christian worldview as we look at different approaches to political philosophy and political issues in our society. And we’re talking about the Green New Deal. But before we get to that, I do want to make an announcement about an upcoming event. On May three and four, we are discovering truth, and an age of opinions in dire Indiana. It’s a Friday night Saturday conference at the village church of Dyer, and we’ve got a number of featured speakers, Michael Akona, Cisco Cotto and Ted right, it’s gonna be a great opportunity for you to come and hear from Christian thinkers to learn more about your faith and how to share it with others. And I’ll be there and some of us here at defenders media, David Montoya has been on our program from time to time, shouldn’t be a lot of fun. You can go to the defenders conference.com to learn more. All right, so we’re talking about the Green New Deal. And some of you might be asking what the green new deal is. And so I’ve invited some folks from the Heartland Institute. We’ve had one follow on from there before. So I want to welcome Donald Kendall and Jim Lakely. To our program. How are you doing? Gentlemen?

Donald: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for having us.

Jim: Happy to be on the show.

Kurt: Great. And here, as people can see you are in studio, which is always nice. Jim is the communications director for Heartland? And Donald, you’re the host of in the tank, the podcast that Heartland puts on?

Donald: That’s right. Yeah. And in fact, I want to warn you, I’m not usually the interviewee of this. I’m frequently in the interviewer. So if I start asking you questions, I apologize.

Kurt: Nice. Great. All right. Well, thank you for coming into the studio to enlighten us on the green New Deal. Right? You know, it’s been out for I guess, a few weeks, maybe a couple of months now. And I wanted to we were doing a series on the explore God’s series churches in the area. We’re doing that. So we stayed with that topical theme. But I wanted to get this political episode in. It’s important, I think, for us to learn what that’s about the proposed Green New Deal, and to see you know, and to think about these issues. Before we jump into that, though, remind us or for folks that maybe didn’t watch our episode on school choice with Lenny Jarrett. What is the Heartland Institute and what type of work do you guys do?

Jim: Well, the Heartland Institute we’re a free market, conservative libertarian, you can put any label you want on it. But we’d like to describe ourselves as a free market Think Tank. We’ve been around since 1984. We were founded in Chicago by a bunch of economists that thought you know, we need an organization here in the Midwest in the heartland, to advocate for free markets, more individual liberty, less government, and freedom. And so we’ve been doing that since 1984. And we’re still going strong. We were in Chicago for almost all of our existence until in 2015, we moved out to a new building that we bought in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Kurt: So still in the Chicago metro area.

Jim: Absolutely.

Kurt: Not downtown Chicago.

Jim: Yeah. Just up in the northwest suburbs where there might be a few more conservatives up there than in downtown Chicago.

Kurt: Sure, sure. For those that are unfamiliar with Chicago politics, it is rough, for people that you know, support views other than the Chicago machine, if you will, I recall a few years ago, there was a fellow he was running for mayor. He didn’t have a D next to his name. And there’s a video on YouTube of this, where he filed the documentation to run for mayor. And and he literally they said they lost the paperwork, even though he has the receipt from the Secretary and so they didn’t put them on the ballot or anything. So that was I think my first experience of realizing the Chicago machine. So in politics, at any rate, so all right. I invited you guys to come on today. And I want to talk about the Green New Deal, which is made headlines and a lot of folks are familiar with the very enthused, enthusiastic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, she’s made numerous headlines throughout the media in the past couple of months here. And this is something that she’s proposed. Now, the green New Deal, maybe you can give us a history of that title. Why did she call it the New Deal?

Jim: Well, the New Deal is definitely trying to harken back to the you know, the the New Deal of the getting out of the Great Depression. So, but it’s also kind of goes back to the leap forward, which was like a proposal out of out of Canada, which actually has a lot of the same elements that you see in the Green New Deal. And then we can, I don’t know if we really necessarily get into like, what that name connotates, you know, the leap forward out of China or anything like that, but yeah, it’s definitely just an overhaul of the way that the economy works, and just a bunch of different government programs. And it just, you know, generally the, the new deal out of the Great Depression has like a positive connotation. So they’re really just trying to kind of ride off of that and add green in there, because that’s the that’s got the environmentalist approval.

Kurt: Right. Right.

Jim: I like to think of it as the green leap forward, right, that Mao brought us, you know,

Kurt: Yes. Right. Okay. I remember learning about that. I may have been seventh or eighth grade…

Jim: right,

Kurt: …when I learned about the leap forward and wasn’t exactly a leap forward.

Jim: No, no, it was not.

Kurt: Okay. So tell us about the green new deal here. So is this a bill that’s been proposed to Congress, and this is something that they’ll vote on?

Donald: Well, it’s not technically a bill. As Democratic leaders have become a little bit stressed about all the attention that AOC has been getting over this, they have made clear like, look, this is a resolution. This is not a bill, this is not a piece of legislation. And in fact, when you read it, you see that it’s a lot of broad outlines, and a lot of goals. But nothing, it’s very unlike, you know, a regular bill that would be submitted, you know, and those things have to go through committees and all of that sort of thing. I covered Capitol Hill for The Washington Times for several years. And so, you know, there’s a big difference between a resolution and a bill resolution is basically a statement of principles that people may vote on, and they often vote on resolution. So it’d be a statement of principles that would come up for a vote. And so I endorsed these principles. And so the principles in the green New Deal are quite radical. They’re quite, quite crazy. It’s full on socialism, actually. And that’s why almost immediately after it was introduced, Majority Leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell said, you know, what, we’re gonna vote on this thing, we’re gonna vote on the green New Deal, because we want everybody on the record of where they stand on the broad principles of basically bringing full on socialism under a green cloak to the United States.

Kurt: So when you say it’s a resolution, not a bill, what you’re saying here is that it’s just getting politicians on the record about sort of their vision for the future. And it’s not really it’s kind of just talking the talk, but it’s not saying we’re actually going to do this. I know, you said that. It’s a crazy proposal. And really, you’re not being hyperbolic, or embellishing here, the resolution calls for getting rid of airplanes, literally farting cows, and a number of other really crazy proposals retrofitting every building in the United States.

Donald: Well, there is kind of a little bit of a distinction. And you can correct me if I’m wrong here. But some of the things that were catching headlines like the getting rid of methane from cow flatulence…getting rid of air travel that actually came from a Frequently Asked Questions thing that they they posted on their website. And it basically had a lot of, I would think, insight into their true intentions in there. The actual stuff that’s in the resolution, though, is just as crazy. I mean, I’m not trying to take away from that. But, I mean, we can pretty much rattle off what’s in there, the green New Deal, or the green part of the green New Deal is the essentially the elimination of all fossil fuels in 10 years. They want to move completely off of fossil fuels onto just solar and wind. Again, I could be slightly mistaken there. But the upgrades every house to make it green, and unlike the smart grid and stuff like that, so those are kind of the green aspects of it. But then as you go further, they’ve got like the universal college program. So there are other issues pertaining to clean energy, universal health care is in there. Federal jobs guarantee is in there. There’s like several other things in there. The FAQ is a pretty interesting story, too. I don’t know if you want to get into that now. But yeah, so the green New Deal is just a wide encompassing thing. It’s the most radical proposal overhaul the United States economy. It’s,… it can’t be understated. Let’s just say that.

Kurt: I didn’t realize I thought it was just a clean energy initiative.

Jim: No, and that’s, and that’s actually one of the things that people don’t realize, you know, it’s just yeah, green New Deal puts on this idea that it’s just about protecting the environment. But it’s basically just a laundry list a wish list of a, you know, liberal, liberal, what they want.

Kurt: The proposals

Jim: Exactly.

Kurt: Right, right. Right. Okay, so let me play a little devil’s advocate here. You know, shouldn’t it be the case that we humans should care for the earth and support clean initiatives?

Donald: Well, Jim, you can probably talk on this just as much as I can. But one thing that you’ll kind of notice is people that are more in the rural areas, right, your more conservative demographic, they have this innate desire to kind of protect the environment that they’re in whether or not it’s a farmer or a hunter, or something like that, to try to keep that environment, the way that they left it, right. So they have that when you look at it more societal level, you realize that once a country reaches a certain tier of like GDP per capita, they start taking care of the environment. So when you see like the United States reached that, you know, like, throughout the industrial age, you start taking care of the environment, you start cracking down on pollution more, you don’t see that necessarily in other countries that have a lower GDP per capita,

Kurt: They”re not as concerned about it,

Donald: Let’s talk about China, you know, the smog masks and stuff like that. So we do have this natural desire to protect the environment. This here though, that’s not what this is for.

Jim: Socialist countries tend to be poor countries. And so that does flow with what Donald just said about, you know, when you, when you create wealth, as a society, that’s when you have, frankly, you have the money, right to to make sure that you clean up your environment, socialist countries tend to be poor, not tend all are always poor. And those are always the dirtiest countries on earth. China, of course, is a great example. Soviet Union did not care about the environment at all, during the Cold War. You know, Venezuela today is a complete Basket Case, Cuba is not very clean, they cleaning up tourist areas now, because capitalism is coming in,… But that’s how it kind of works out. And, and so, you know, you have to understand that the Eco left, as I like to call them are not really interested in cleaning the environment, if they would, they would actually look at the United States and be celebrating it. We are the cleanest modern, and you know, large economy, in the history of human civilization. Our air is cleaner than it has ever been our water and our land is cleaner than it has ever been. The EPA was was established, I think, 1973 certainly early set 1970s by Richard Nixon, in my mind, the Environmental Protection Agency should basically declare victory, have a big party, fire half of the staff, and then just have the rest of them just maintaining and you know, make sure making sure they’re maintaining the victories that we’ve had on clean air, clean water and clean land. That’s the truth of the United States, we don’t need the green New Deal to protect clean air, clean water and clean land, we’ve already achieved that the green New Deal is not about any of those things. The Green New Deal is about controlling our economy, and ultimately controlling people our behavior. That’s what the green New Deal is about.

Kurt: Yeah. When you when you compare the United States to some of these other nations, which are really causing the issue of global pollution, you know, up in the air and in the ocean. It’s something like I read something about like Three Rivers over in Asia constitute, like 80 or 90% of ocean, trash, plastics, the plastics in the ocean, and you think, Boy, I mean, so why should the United States be cracking down hardcore on, you know, plastic bag use and those sorts of things? We’re barely the issue. So now I know that in Caracas, Venezuela, they’re doing their part to cut down on energy. Because there’s a big blackout there.

Donald: Yeah, no, it’s actually a really terrible story. I mean, when you’re looking at it, it’s it’s been ongoing, correct. It hasn’t resolved itself. And I saw just like a headline today talking about, like, the amount of deaths that have just been happening. I mean, one thing that we have to realize is that energy is the master resource, you know, is the cornerstone of industry, and it’s the lifeblood of society. And it’s just like that is a perfect example of what happens when the sieve of energy is cut off. It’s a it’s a nightmare. It’s a terrible nightmare. So that’s why when I see proposals like this, oh, really cut down the amount of energy production in the United States. I don’t think of it as like some type of good for the environment I think of is pretty much anti human.

Jim: People have to understand that if the green new deals energy goals ere actually achievable, which they’re not. But if they were, but if we need to get there, wind and solar constitute about 10% of the United States energy production, there is less than that is less than that. And the rest of us from fossil fuels, coal and natural gas, mostly.

Kurt:And then we’ve got nuclear power plants. It’s always fascinating to see how politicians will frequently exempt themselves from the bills that they’re proposing.

Jim: Not frequently, always.

Kurt: Yeah, doesn’t exactly exactly make you feel comfort in the civil servants that are running the show.

Donald: We don’t have to go further than like Bernie Sanders. You know, he’s preaching democratic socialism. But then while living in one of his three mansions and making millions off of book deals and stuff like that, so yeah, the hypocrisy runs deep.

Jim: and nuke, right. And then, of course, the green New Deal hates nukes. So you know, they care about the environment and carbon dioxide emissions, nukes is completely clean, and that’s going to be cut off, they’re actually going to end America’s nuclear program as well. But if you were able to do all of these things, this would destroy people don’t even understand. I mean, it would be like Venezuela, on the scale of a continental country with 330 million people in it, the amount of suffering that would come about in 10 years, because that’s when all this stuff would be happening. And if they were able to be dictators, for the next 10 years, this is what they would do. They of course, would have be able to fly and have energy and all these things. But the rest of us, we’re going to have to get along with the program. And it would be misery on a scale not seen in human civilization.

Kurt: Yeah, yeah. All right. So with the green New Deal, what you’re seeing here is, we’ve got this proposal, but it’s not just an environmental proposal. There’s also health care, and college and job security, whatever that might mean. I don’t know if the government’s gonna be having people build bridges to nowhere, as classically was the case with the 1930s. New Deal.So but But shouldn’t we care for people? Should we have an interest in their future? Ocasio Cortez says people should be worried to even have children, because of the state of what’s coming? Shouldn’t we care for the future of America?

Donald: Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on how you’re putting that if you’re talking about social safety nets or something like that, that seems like a separate,

Kurt: which already exists.

Donald: Sure. And that’s, that’s a separate conversation. We were talking about, like this green New Deal, and the goal to completely eradicate carbon dioxide emissions and stuff like that. Even if we were to kind of take on his hypothetical here. If we were to actually in do this and get rid of all carbon dioxide emissions and stuff like that, like would that save the world? It would not. Because the United States I think, makes up about less than 15% of co2 emissions in the world, China and going down because of our use of natural gas, right? China, on the other hand, makes up like 30 30%, plus and going up, right, so for every coal power plant that we shut down, they’re opening up three. So there’s nothing that we can do unilaterally, that’s going to save the earth. So it’s kind of like a it’s a miss misconception, I guess.

Jim: I would just add to that there’s, there’s something that actually irritates me quite a bit. Because at the Heartland Institute, we’re known globally, really, for our work with scientists who are skeptical that humans are causing a climate crisis, we’ve been doing this on a very intense scale for more than a decade now. We really kind of made it our own issue. And we are known, we’re the leading think tank on this and you can just look it up. And you know, we’re the leading think tank on this, by the way, we’re attacked by the Environmental left. But it’s the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, they talk about carbon pollution. And what they mean is the is the emissions of carbon dioxide through use of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it does not harm any human being. It is is an odorless gas that is essential to life on earth. What they’re trying to conflate and they’re doing this on purpose, the idea of soot, which is actually coming out of power plants that burn coal in China, which is why they have those masks on that’s carbon pollution. Carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, especially a gas powered by natural gas powered power plants are scrubbed of almost all of that pollution, it is just carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that is not harmful to humans and that so I really would love your audience to realize that and internalize that one point on the climate going forward. But yes, there’s if we did everything the Paris Climate Agreement that Donald Trump famously pulled the United States out, I went to Paris when that thing was signed on, still had events there to do that. And was big celebration global party. This is fantastic. Every industrialized economy in Europe, tried their best to do what the climate agreement said they all failed. They all increase their carbon dioxide emissions. The United States said, I don’t know. Our carbon dioxide emissions. declined. And then Trump just pulled us out one of his first big motions as president. And that’s because capitalism, and it works.

Donald: Yeah, it wasn’t a concerted effort to try to cut our carbon emissions, it was just the natural, it was the natural gas from the fracking revolution and stuff like that, which has a lower carbon emission output when you use it. So it was again, like, as he was saying, it was just capitalism, free markets that led to the the downsizing of co2 emissions.

Jim: And if every nation on earth did every single thing that the Paris Climate Agreement said had to be done, which was kind of similar to the green New Deal actually not that different in a lot of ways. The difference in global temperature by their own estimations by the year 2100, would be about point or 0.2 degrees Celsius, and amount, a temperature amount that is within the margin of error that really can’t actually be accurately measured over that distance of time.

Kurt: So they couldn’t even test to confirm whether everything that was done was effective,

Jim: Right. And so that’s that just as more points to the idea that the green New Deal is not about saving the environment, it is not about you know, anything other than controlling governments, controlling economies and ultimately controlling people. That’s what that is what the goal of all of this is, because a free people making their own choices and living their own lives is a threat to government power. And they cannot Can’t they cannot handle that.

Kurt: So before we get back to some of the specifics of the green New Deal, I want to ask about the Paris agreement. And we talked about how China is, you know, building three coal plants for every one that we take down. Does it seem like we need to have some global collaboration to get some of those Asian nations or other nations which haven’t been concerned about pollution? Does there need to be global collaboration, sort of like a Paris agreement? But that’s reasonable?

Donald: I frequently see kind of stories, I have a much more optimistic look on the future. You know, I, when we, when we watch movies, and TV, you know, frequently you see like these dystopian futures where you know, the skies are darkened by pollution and stuff like that, I have a much more optimistic look, Outlook, I constantly see these articles talking about different innovations, whether or not it’s some type of boat that just goes through and collects all of the trash that you had mentioned earlier, the plastics and stuff like that, and recycles it into wristbands and stuff like that, or, or the ideas that are floated out there, you know, if co2 were to become some huge problem that converts that co2 back into something else that we could just put in the ground and stuff like that,

Kurt: Which I you know, it’s probably intentional, you brought that up, because I just read an article, while it’s still kind of expensive, a scientist has discovered how to grab carbon out of the air and to make it into a

indiscernible

Kurt: Well grabs it out of the atmosphere, and can put it into the ground, basically.

Donald: Right.

Kurt: So that fascinating,

Donald: Yeah, I think just the kind of the natural flow of things and just, you know, people, people striving to do better things and leave the world in a better state than it was when they when they entered it. You know, I think that natural push will solve all the problems that we can consider without having to rely on some super governmental agreements like that, that nobody will abide by. And it’ll be plagued with politics and carve outs for special interests and stuff like that. So I think that relying on that idea is don’t get your hopes up.

Jim: Freedom, free market capitalism, economic freedom, that is what’s going to solve any and all climate crises that come our way as a civilization as a global civilization over the next 500 years. And we in the United States alone, we are literally standing on 300 years worth of fossil fuels. 300 years, you understand that we didn’t even know how to use the Industrial Revolution wasn’t 300 years ago. And by some estimations, we have 500 years of fossil fuels just under our feet in the continental United States. That’s when Columbus got here. Okay, that’s the kind of timescale we’re talking about. And so this idea that we have to transition in the next 10 years to full green, renewable energy is insanity. And it would cause so much economic destruction that we would never be able to clean up this planet. The fastest way to ruin the earth is to enact the green New Deal, because everything would go to pot.

Donald: Yeah, and I mean, I can elaborate on that stuff, too. Like just just the idea. Okay, we talked about it being an economic disaster just because of the idea of really, you know, cutting off the supply of energy, like I mentioned, the master resource and stuff like that and replacing it with solar and wind that’s considered two to five times more expensive But on top of that, if you were to look at just the costs of the proposal of the green new deal for taxpayers, yeah, we’re talking about a figure that is I think there was a headline that was going around recently of some estimation, that was saying that it was 94 trillion plus,

Kurt: oh, my gosh,

Donald: We looked into that on the podcasts, we had, basically, a whole episode about it. And every estimate that’s in that paper is a extremely conservative estimate, like we’re talking north of $150 trillion over the next 10 years. And I mean, like, I can get into it a little bit, because I have these kind of fresh in mind, but like one of the examples, and you mentioned that the green New Deal was not for nucular. And just that component of it, of getting rid of all fossil fuels. This paper, which was from the American Action Forum, who is the president of it’s the person that led this study, was actually a former head of the CBO. So the Congressional Budget Office, so kind of knows what he’s talking about to a degree probably understates things. So anyways, it was saying that the that component was, you know, several trillion dollars, but the assumptions that it made, was that a, that we’d be able to rely heavily on a new healer power, which is not okay, in the green New Deal, that we wouldn’t have to construct new infrastructure like power lines and stuff like that, which is a huge assumption, because any of these major wind or solar power plants would have to built in the middle of nowhere. And then they would have need transmission lines to bring it to them. Yeah, there was another giant assumption as well. But basically, when you take all Oh, yeah, battery power, okay. So wind and solar are intermittent, right? The wind isn’t always blowing, and the sun is always shining, right. So when we have these nucular or SI solar or wind systems, we need natural gas as a as a backup, basically, for those times when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining. So the other way to get around that, again, when we don’t have natural gas, because of the green New Deal, you need battery backup. And the technology is just not there yet. In fact, any any green New Deal expert person advocating for it will admit that battery power is not there yet. So this estimation, basically projected that we would need like four hours of battery backup, whereas the academics will acknowledge that we need somewhere north of 12 hours. So again, …

Kurt: That’s per day?

Donald: Well, just in case the wind doesn’t blow…

Kurt: Oh, I see.

Donald: So when you take all of those things into account that likes you know, $10 trillion component of this green New Deal is so much more expensive than even what the American Action Forum is suggesting. It’s astonishing. So then you could say the same thing for every one of the components for the green New Deal. It’s crazy. Crazy.

Jim: Here’s another factor, maybe Donnie can, since you just talked about this on the in the tank podcast with Heartland Institute. And you might know this on more more top of mind than me. But the people have this idea that wind and solar are free, because the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and nobody pays for nature. God gives that to us. Sure. And it’s free. And there’s and that translates into, there’s no cost to these things. And certainly there’s no environmental cost to these things. to scale up wind and solar, let’s just presume for the sake of argument that it is reliable, that it has much more than a 24% reliability rate, or a 15% reliability rate that actually 12 hours a day, when the sun is shining, it’s grabbing energy for us and that the wind is blowing it just the perfect speed. So that it’s it’s optimizing the wind, the wind farms, the turbines, the amount of land use to put up all the solar panels. And all of the wind turbines is massive. It’s almost unimaginably massive. We’re talking on a scale of taking up the land area of an entire state or two in the United States.

Donald: Yeah, there was a study, I guess I’m a little report, I won’t call it a study a report by the Manhattan Institute that does a lot of energy stuff as well. And they said, if you were to do all of the energy required from just wind power, it would take the land area equivalent of two Californias

Kurt: Oh, my goodness,

*Indiscernible

Donald: Wiping clean everything that’s in California, putting up just a massive amount of wind turbines twice.

Jim: Yes. And what do wind turbines do? They kill birds wind turbines are the most efficient, wonderful bird killers that man has ever devised. They slaughter somewhere between just the just the wind turbines we have in United States now slaughter between, you know, around half a million birds and bats every year. And the environmental left doesn’t care. I thought they cared about the environment, about nature. They don’t care about just basically chopping up birds. And of course, solar panels there on the ground actually takes a lot of water to use solar panels. They have to be cleaned so that they’re efficient, and then that but that also disturbs the migratory paths of tour. turtles, tortoises, all sorts of different animals, you take away all that land. Again, if you had two Californias worth of land, how many animals have to be displaced, killed, move, whatever. I mean, make this happen. People never think these things I should say they don’t never ask the advocates of the green New Deal to explain these things, or even think these things pass even the second level of curiosity.

Kurt: Yeah, that they’re not looking at the practical ramifications. What do you do if this is installed?

Donald: Well, yeah, people try to usually only look at what the perceived benefits are, don’t necessarily look at what ends justify the mean, right? Yeah. When you look at it, just that one side, you know, anything could look good, right? You know, I cut off my arm, well, I lost 10 pounds, I don’t have an arm. But you know, I’m only looking at the journey.

Kurt: So there are unintended consequences here. And it’s really important to look at these unintended consequences. Yeah,

Donald: I mean, in that conversation of the costs, of actually moving forward with some of these things, solar and wind, even go way further than what he was just talking about another component of the green New Deal. And it’s kind of littered with this kind of abstract language, and you kind of like social justice stuff, and land rights stuff that you don’t really know how far it goes, or why they put it in there. But like the land rights thing, for example, it’s basically to protect from like mining and extracting resources out of the land. And just Where are you going to get the metals to build all of the wind turbines? Where you’re gonna need? Where are you gonna get all the rare earth minerals…

Kurt: The batteries

Donald: to construct batteries or solar panels themselves?

Kurt: And that’s creating batteries isn’t a clean initiative in its own right. No, it takes factories to create batteries…

Donald: …or the strip mining required for lithium and stuff like…

Jim: Yeah, how fast we’re gonna make those batteries when we get the technology and battery technology that could store wind and solar and you know, stuff. That’s intermittent. That’s fantastic. And the sooner we get it, the better. That’s great.

Donald: Five to 10 years away, they say

Jim: They’ve been saying that for about 20 years.

Donald: Probably yes.

Jim: But, when we get that how are we going to be able to scale up the manufacturer again, as just as you pointed out, Kurt, of those batteries on a massive global scale using wind and solar, you’re gonna need those, those coal fired and those natural gas fired power plants to.. power the factories just to make these things. The whole thing is it’s just it’s just wish casting. It’s fairy dust. It’s ridiculous. And to think it’s intended to be ridiculous, because it’s supposed to lull you to sleep for what they really want. And again, and keep bringing it back to this, but it’s about full on socialism. It’s about controlling people. That’s what it’s all about.

Kurt: We’ve got to take a short break here. When we come back, though, we’re going to explore more of the details of the green New Deal. And also, Donald, you mentioned the FAQ section

Donald: Oh, right

Kurt: …on the site is worth exploring. So stick with us through the short break from our sponsors.

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Kurt: Thanks for sticking with us through that short break from our sponsors. If you’d like to learn how you can become a sponsor, you can go to our website, veracityhill.com. And you can look at the different sponsorship options there. We’d love to help support your organization, your business, perhaps your ministry, through airing and advertisement here. And not only is the advertisement played on our live stream here, but we also have a radio program now, which we’ve begun airing in partnership with the Wilkins radio network. And so we’re very thankful for that opportunity. And for our patrons, those are persons that just chip in 510 or 20 bucks a month to help this program, continue to go and grow. And so we would love to get your monthly support. If you are one of our monthly supporters, either financially or just moral support, we’d love to get your review on iTunes or the Google Play Store, perhaps on our Facebook page as well. Please give us a good review that way, people that are coming to our program for the first time can see what other people think about us. So Thanks for considering that. And we look forward to reading your reviews as well, we’d be happy to share them here on the program. All right. Well, today I’m joined by Donald Kendall and Jim Lakely, of the Heartland Institute. And we’re talking about the Green New Deal, which is a not a bill as perhaps I had thought but a resolution, a call, which is sort of like a vision, what sort of vision should America go toward? And then I guess, guys, I guess the bills that would come forward after that would try to reflect the resolution? How consistent is Congress in following through with their resolutions?

Jim: Well, well, what’s interesting is I just saw Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker for the Democrats just the other day was asked again about the Green New Deal. And she’s kind of been dismissive about it kind of funnily. So like the green, the green, new, whatever, she said, at one point

Donald: …the green dream, or whatever…

Jim: the green dream or whatever it is, right? Well, just the other day, she said this, like, look, you know, stop asking about if we’re going to pass the green New Deal. That’s not how it works. You know, she’s been in Congress forever. And she’s like, you know, we we will go through the committees, and each committee will bring up maybe a piece of the green New Deal as a bill and it will go through the committee and will be marked up and then be brought to the House floor. You know, that’s how legislation is done, young lady is but basically what she’s saying to Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez. So we’ll see how far that gets. I mean, I think personally, that her, her goal is to have all of it just dying committee just have it out there as kind of a energizing factor for Democrats going into 2020. But well, I don’t think I’d be very good idea for any of that stuff to come through a committee and actually pass and come up for a vote.

Donald: This is my podcast host coming through. And I have a question for you Jim so you see, like, you kind of see the, you know, the party establishment or, you know, like Nancy Pelosi kind of pushing back against it, or Dianne Feinstein kind of had that run in with like those kids outside of her office and kind of showed that she is not particularly for it. But then why do you see all of the Democratic nominees for President kind of endorsing it,

Jim: because the base of the Democratic Party, which is going to be the most important coalition to gather around yourself as a presidential candidate are hard leftists. And they love the green New Deal. They’ve seen that they do their own polling, they know this. They may not even believe most of that stuff. And, frankly, for the future of America, I hope they don’t believe any of it, but are just pretending to so that they can attract the votes that they need from the hard eco left of their party.That’s why

Donald: It’s just kind of a populist, knee jerk.

Jim: Absolutely.

Kurt: You certainly get that on both sides of the aisle as well. Right. I mean, even with the Republican Party, there’s things that they, you know, might say or say that they’ll do. Sure. And then they and then they don’t so sadly, that’s, I guess, just part of politics.

Donald: Yeah, no doubt.

Kurt: Yeah. So it’s something that happens on both sides. All right. So in exploring more of the the green New Deal, there was the call for getting rid of airfare entirely. except for probably the elites and, you know, people that can afford their private planes.

Donald: Yeah, I don’t know how they’re going to do a train across the ocean yet. I don’t think they figured that one out.

Kurt: Yeah, I’m sure the people of Hawaii love that idea.

Jim: Sailboats, two words, sailboats very green.

Kurt: So high speed rail is something that’s been on the radar for people for a while now. And over in Asia, there are different, you know, systems of high speed rail in the state of California. There was a proposal under former Governor Jerry Brown, but that program has now been pun intended. derailed. I guess it ended up being a big failure, something like $4 billion dollars spent on it and…

Donald: Yeah, over budget over-schedule I think that’s kind of the general norm when it comes to kind of government. You know, projects like that, but yeah, and the details are a little hazy. Again, we talk About this on a podcast a few weeks ago, but the plan was to have a high speed rail from LA to San Francisco, I think. And it was plagued by just a ton of politics, kind of like I mentioned before. So the the original plan was to pretty much have a direct route from those two major cities. But then over the course of time, again, political carve outs, and you know, people trying to tweak the path of the train to hit certain other populated areas, actually slow down the train, slow down construction, increased the costs of this to a point where the plan just fell apart. So I think what was left instead of a high speed rail, going from San Francisco to LA again, it could be messed up on those tubes.

Jim: You’re right.

Donald: Okay. What we got was a moderate speed, moderate speed rail, going from like Bakersfield to some other town

Kurt: or something

Jim: Merced, I think it was in the Central Valley, right?

Donald: So then you just kind of take that small little failure of the one state and just extrapolated across the entire country. If we’re going to have a network of high speed rails going from all of these population centers all over the country. Just think of all the politics are gonna be in play there or the the requirement of like eminent domain and stuff like that to go to take it direct.

Kurt: Right, right. you have for people that don’t want to give up their their property, their private property which they own? the government comes and basically seizes a section of that property or maybe the whole property altogether,

Donald: and just like most kinds of socialism, things, it’s for the greater good. Good individuals, individualism be damned, it’s for the greater good

Jim: guess why the High Speed Rail began from Bakersfield and Merced,

Donald: Merced. That’s it.

Jim: Eminent Domain because people in San Francisco and rent in Silicon Valley and people in Los Angeles were not were fighting him. He was all nimbyism, sorry that do not bring that thing through here. No way. And so they couldn’t resolve any of those issues. Not even close. All right, all right, we’ll just start in the middle of nowhere. This is literally a train to nowhere don’t know, no disrespect to people live in Bakersfield, or Merced. But there is no need to get from Merced to Bakersfield that fast, everybody who lives there needs to get from those employees that fast and get. So it is literally a high speed train to nowhere that was never high speed and was actually never even a train. I don’t even think a train has run on any track over there yet. There’s still I’ve seen pictures of huge, they had an elevated and huge, you know, elevated concrete poured, you know, supports to support rails that are just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, and they’re going to end that way. And what’s kind of funny is that Trump, I don’t know, if you saw this, President Trump said, You know what we gave it because the federal government contributed money to that project, I think, a couple billion, something like that, like that. And he was contingent on the thing actually getting done. And so I think just two weeks ago, the Trump ministration said, We need our money back, because you hadn’t told us it was a loan contract. So now California, technically owes the taxpayer, the federal taxpayers it was Washington, DC, a couple billion dollars. So

Kurt: I’m always fascinated. I’m always fascinated by people who think that state governments aren’t doing enough, but think that if they go to another level, that that’s going to change everything, let’s just get more people involved. And

Donald: Yeah, I mean, we’re kind of talking about relativism, you know, to a degree, so I think that the more local the governing body is, the more efficient it is more efficient it is, the more likely that they’ll be kind of in the details. When it’s like the federal government, and they’re talking about a local issue. It’s like, yeah, just throw a few billion dollars at it, you know, so it’s only, it’s only until you get to the local forms of government, where they are really held accountable. So, you know, like I said, government, you can kind of expect them to do a poor job. But the lower the scale, again, relative, the better.

Kurt: And with local governments, it’s easier to get involved, it’s easier for you to have your say, to run for office to show up to city a city council meeting, much harder to show up to Capitol Hill and want to meet with your senator and complain,

Donald: right, you get the pet project that you’re, you know, get some money behind it or something.

Kurt: Yeah, exactly. So local government tends to be more efficient. But there’s perhaps even something more efficient than local government, and you guys have brought it up, it’s sort of the market, there are these companies that, you know, you’re looking to clean up the ocean. So you have entrepreneurs, starting nonprofits raising money to build boats, which help collect the trash. And this is becoming a good success. I think I even saw something about like a drone boat, which is like solar powered, and it just goes around, just hunting, you know, all on its own. And so these sort of projects occur because the market is ahead of the collective deciding what to do.

Donald: Yeah, you know, I would actually wager and I don’t have any numbers to back this up. But I would wager then we’re talking about kind of public transportation, that just the free market idea of ride sharing has probably done more for public transportation than any high speed rail could ever do. And you’re basically using a car that would just be sitting there doing Nothing, and then using it to transport people somewhere, you know? So yeah, the free market kind of fills in all the gaps that we need if it just given enough time and, you know, prevent it from being manipulated too much by government.

Kurt: Yeah, it seems like it’s always ahead of the curve,

Donald: Right

Kurt: Entrepreneurs are ahead of the curve. And you see this not just in clean initiatives, but education and healthcare, it seems like the market has been the reason for the advancement and the Wealth of Nations why we have prosperity. Why, why, you know, even the poorest of Americans are still well off, we still have cell phones, they probably still have a K through 12 education. So we still have these good things, because the market has gone that way and allowed America to be so prosperous, even if there are taxpayer programs. It’s still contingent upon the success of the market.

Jim: Yeah, governments don’t serve markets. That’s not their purpose. Entrepreneurs, they serve markets. And I think a great example of this is the VA hospital system, it’s government run, they have customers, they have lots of customers, they have customers that are basically funneled right to their front door, and it is a disaster, and people die, because they can’t get treatment, they need a solution to that, actually, and it’s something that, you know, I would hope that Donald Trump and the VA that the head of the VA that he’s appointed, will start thinking about this in a serious way, the heartland astute has been advocating for this, a lot of free market, think tanks have been advocating for this, stop funneling these veterans through the VA hospital system, give them a voucher, and then let them go to the hospital that that can serve them best. And in fact that that’s the only way the government was able to create a market incentive in this because it would put the power in the veteran who needs health care to go to the hospital of his choice. Now you have hospitals competing for those veterans to come into their doors. In the VA hospital system, the incentives are completely backwards. And in fact is the humans that suffer the under the VA system, because there is no market force whatsoever. Government is not does not serve markets. Government tells people what to do and takes money from people. That’s their two main their two main purposes in life.

Donald: Yeah, and I don’t want to go off too much of a tangent here. But I mean, like the same kind of type of market forces you could see. And I’m sure Lenny talked about this education savings accounts, yeah, really puts control in the consumer hands. Same thing with like the, you know, health care, savings accounts, stuff like that. So you’re spending your money on healthcare. So it introduces those price signals into the average consumer that’s looking at health care. So yeah, you have to, you have to have these price signals, you have to have free markets. That’s the only way to have an efficient system like that.

Kurt: With the few moments we’ve got left here, Donald, I want to go over you mentioned the Frequently Asked Questions section on I guess there’s a website where people can learn about the Green New Deal.

Donald: Yeah, I believe that she put it up on her own congressional website. At first, it was a frequently asked questions, FAQ sheet. And it was basically the source of a lot of the headlines that you kind of started off this conversation with Yeah. And so it started off. And it was like a several page document. And it kind of just outlined all of the frequently asked questions that people would have about the Green New Deal. But in it, when people started reading through it, it had some like ridiculous stuff in there, like the idea of completely getting rid of planes, the idea of dealing with cows because of their farts, and stuff like that, the idea of providing economic security for those that are unable and unwilling to work, right. So people started reading into this, and they basically just started mocking it. And they started putting out these like, fake versions of it. That’s like, every house needs to have a massage chair, and you know, like, just ridiculous things, things that nobody should believe it was just a tongue in cheek. But you know, because it was coincided with these other things that I mentioned, people weren’t sure which ones were real and not. So I think it was a spokesman went on Tucker Carlson and representing Ocasio Cortez and Tucker Carlson brings up the idea that in the FAQ, it said that we would provide economic security for those unwilling to work. And the representative either unsure of what was actually in the proposal or just straight up lying said that no, that was just the mockery version that was being sent around. And they kind of ran with this idea that those ones that were actually in the FAQ was a lie for a couple of days. I think it was over the course of a weekend. And then until I think ABC came out with it, they actually downloaded the thing off of the website, and they put it out there and it shows all of those ridiculous proposals getting rid of planes, cows and providing economic security for those unwilling to work and it was kind of just like, shoved right back in.

Jim: Yeah, I mean, I downloaded it actually myself and we beat on Heartlands website heartland.org And put green New Deal up in the in the search box, you’ll be able to find it for yourself because they tried to make it disappear that tried to you know, put it down there. Emery Hall, but you know, that’s their factsheet was a joke. But it’s really not a joke because it actually reflects, again, the fact that the green New Deal is not about green. And it’s not new, either. It’s old school socialism, and they and so in the FAQ and the fact sheet, it really kind of lays out in more detail what, what they aim to do, and it is to severely restrict your liberty, because they don’t like the way you’re living your life period.

Kurt: The Green New Deal seems like it’s politically impossible to implement,

Donald: Yeah, at multiple levels. So you know, he was talking about kind of the pushback that you see from the establishment to kind of Democrat Party and stuff like that. But like, on the local level, on the state levels, you see these kind of major push backs, and it kind of goes back to kind of land usage issues. So states like Vermont, California, New York things, you know, states that you would think are more woke, quote, unquote, they push back against these kinds of these big solar and wind projects. The most recent case of this is San Bernardino County in California, which is the largest county in California, it’s the largest county in America actually represents about 12% of California, they ban they passed a ban on a large solar power facilities in that in that county. Basically, their arguments were environmental as well, they were saying, once we take this land and turn it into some type of power plants, you know, giant solar power plant, which generally take up 700 times the land area that traditional power plants need, we’re not going to get that back. So it’s like, it’s not just pushback from our side that’s preventing these installations of wind and solar, it’s pushback from environmentalists left as well. So it’s just like the litigation required to even get some of these going, it’s going to take far more than the 10 years that this whole thing is supposed to be implemented. It’s just impossible.

Jim: Just as coincidence What happened actually, I actually lived not in San Bernardino County, but Riverside County, I had a job at a newspaper in Riverside, California, and San Bernardino, is just north of that. It is the largest county in America, it is mostly just all desert. Right? If there was a perfect play, and it is desolate, I mean, it takes up 12% of the land of California, it is not 12% of the population. It’s you know, the number of people who live there kind of only in the south, southwest corner of it, the rest of it is just desert. I think the I think the actually the I think Death Valley is in San Bernardino County. So if you can’t do a big massive solar project, … you should be able to do it anywhere. You can’t do it anywhere. I mean, it is literally the most perfect place to do a major solar solar project is San Bernardino County, because there’s nobody out there it’s

Kurt: interesting

Jim: desert for as long as you can drive.

Donald: Yeah, it’s the, it’s an illustrative of this idea. It’s called like the vacant land myth, who Robert Bryce, who’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute talks a lot about. And it’s this idea that we have just like these open, barren, arid areas that could just be filled up with wind and solar. But the, like I said, the local pushback and stuff like that, and the fact that most of this land is owned one way or the other, it’s just like, it’s a myth, that we just have these vast open areas.

Kurt: Fascinating. I mean, I went to school in LA and so I’ve seen a lot of these open areas, but I guess, you know, the local governments there, they they foresee, you know, that there will be future use, and that they don’t want it to be this locked in, you know, power, you know, power creation. Use, they’ve got the reasons, like you said that its environmental base as well.

Donald: You know, one other thing I was gonna bring this up earlier, but we were talking about solar, just the environmental impact of that is like, is becoming to the forefront. So again, in California, they are piling up solar panel waste. So your average solar panel loses like two to 3%, or something like that of its efficiency like every year and have to be replaced after 30 years. So what is happening is this build up of these solar panels that are useless now and they have to figure out what to do with it. And these things are built with, like toxic materials, in some cases, like lead and caveum, stuff like that, where you can’t just put it in the ground, or else it will seep into the groundwater and stuff like that. So they basically are trying to figure out what to do with it. They’re treating it like a toxic material. And once if, again, if we go to the green New Deal, and we have 50 plus percent of our power generated by solar, we’re going to have an issue way worse than any of nucular waste disposal problem that we can ever imagine.

Kurt: Wow. Again, these unintended consequences, it seems people are unwilling to deal with and maybe, you know, they propose what appears to be a good idea. And then they just don’t think through or they haven’t even taken the time to research and to study what the implications are. And the more you study and look into this, you say, hey, this stuff is not good in the long run. And we shouldn’t do it. And in fact, it’s it’s regulation on the marketplace that restricts businesses, it’s going to cost taxpayer dollars, not just taxpayers, but consumers, right. So if we had to retrofit every building to be energy efficient to live on solar and wind, well, our electric bills, I mean, just looking at it from a consumer strict, you know, what is my bill gonna look like month to month, you said anywhere from two to four times the amount, people are not going to want to be paying that type of money.

Donald: Yeah, and I mean, this kind of gets to like, like the what happens next type of thing. So I think that it’s, you can easily assume that we’re not going to be able to generate the amount of power with these alternative sources when they’re solar. So what would happen realistically, if this was enforced is a rationing of energy. And when you put the government in charge of that, then it starts to get really scary. But that’s probably that’s probably a topic of another hour. I don’t know if we want to get into that. But…

Kurt: yeah, you do see that rationing occurring in healthcare over in the UK. I’ve read a number of articles about that. And so the rationing is something you certainly want to avoid. The market has a way of, of bringing about, you might call it like a natural or market effect of rationing. When when some resource becomes limited. Well, what happens, people adapt. And so there’s a new, good that comes to the forefront, there’s a new wave,

Donald: Supply goes down, cost goes up, you find a new equilibrium,

Kurt: Right

Donald: You know?

Kurt: and you don’t have to have a board of either elected or bureaucrats deciding who gets what

Jim: the science director of the Heartland Institute said something, it’s just so common sensical. But he’s like, we will never run out of oil, because, you know, there was talking about peak oil in the 70s. When Carter was present, we were gonna run out of oil, right? And they said, We will, we will never run out of oil ever, like really? Like, of course not. Because at some point, it would be too expensive to extract it. So there’s always be some you know, right. But that is actually a very one sentence lesson on basic economics. And is that is that as you know, the reason that we have 300 to 500 years of fossil fuels under our feet, a lot of natural gas, especially thanks to the fracking revolution, again, the markets brought this about is because it is it is economically efficient to bring that up, when it becomes too expensive to bring it up and to sell it will stop doing it. And then and then the market will figure out a new source of energy, a better source of energy, a cheaper, more abundant source of energy, the government is not there are there is nobody in the government, not a single person, not a million people in the federal government smart enough to figure out exactly what our energy scale should be, what exactly what our energy portfolio should be in the United States, markets figure that out for us. And in fact, when you ask government to do these things, you are asking not just for rationing, but again, like with Venezuela, you’re asking, you’re inevitably going to bring about misery it is going to happen, there won’t even be enough energy to ration that people. You know, the rationing would be so severe that, in practicality, we wouldn’t have any energy. I mean, this entire country could be Venezuela and darkened out. This is why it will never happen. I would hope. I mean, we take it would take a military has this to happen, because I really think I don’t even think our politicians aren’t this dumb. It really can’t come about, but it’s a bit of like I said before, it’s not about energy. It’s not about the climate. It’s about socialism. It’s about controlling us.

Kurt: Right. A recent survey indicated over 50% of young Americans supported socialistic ideas. Donald, we’ve got some work to do,

Donald: ya know, and that’s actually kind of what spurred on the stopping socialism project at the Heartland Institute. So we really started this just a couple of months ago at stopping socialism.com. Justin Haskins, who’s kind of like the main kind of leader of this project, he has been all over the place, whether it’s writing articles for Fox News and stuff like that, or appearing on OAN, and Tucker Carlson, stuff like that he has been talking about a lot. We have been going to different conferences, he was just at CPAC talking about this very important topic. We are at LibertyCon in January. We’re going to be in the western conservative summit in July in Denver talking about this very important topic. But yeah, like what we really want to do well, a stop socialism, but be is to really put that negative connotation back on that word, because it used to be a dirty word politics, you know, nobody was calling themselves a socialist, and it’s still kind of as a dirty word. That’s why they put democratic in front of it and pretend it means something different. But yeah, we really want to put that that negative connotation back on the word

Kurt: and not just that, but really help people understand why it is bad. And to equip them to tell others

Donald: economically and morally it’s a horrible system. And yeah, that’s kind of our main enemy right now. And that that figure that you talked about, that’s what keeps me up at night.

Kurt: right, right. Good. Gentlemen, thank you for coming into the studio and cleaning us in more about the truly the absurdity of the proposed resolution, the green New Deal. It’s something to be cautious of and to just reject. And then maybe as Mitch McConnell said, Yeah, let’s let’s take a vote out. Let’s get people on the record to see where they really stand. So thank you so much for coming in.

Donald: Thanks for having us.

Kurt: All right. Well, that does it for our show. Today. I’m grateful for the continued support of our patrons. And the partnerships that we have with our sponsors. They are defenders media, consult Kevin, the sky floor, rethinking Hill, the Illinois Family Institute, and Fox restoration. I want to thank our technical producer Chris, for all the fine work that he does week in and week out. And to our guests today, Donald and Jim, thank you so much, guys. Last but not least, I want to thank you for listening in and for striving for truth on faith, politics, and society.