In the midst of the winter storm and power outages in Texas, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) heads down to Houston in order to raise money for and distribute rations to those affected by the severe weather. Although such actions are seen as charitable, it is clear that AOC is taking advantage of this situation in order to advance her environmentalist agenda, especially when she stated that the outages would not have happened had her Green New Deal been adopted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she is also trying to turn the people of Texas against Senator Ted Cruz, especially after she falsely claimed that he was trying to have her killed, and because he happened to be vacationing in Cancun when the storm hit Texas.
At any rate, she is trying to sell her Green New Deal to the Lone Star State, but I doubt such an idea is going to be received with open arms, given Texas’s conservative base and the jobs provided by the oil industry.
Since the Green New Deal would replace oil, gas, coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy with solar and wind energy, it would eliminate 6.8 million jobs, which in turn would be an economic disaster. It would also result in higher electric bills.
Nor would the Green New Deal be “green”, since it would mean destroying millions of acres of land in order to build solar panels and wind turbines.
In addition, the Green New Deal would not be energy-efficient since it would rely on the sun shining and the wind blowing in order to operate the solar panels and wind turbines, something that does not happen all the time. Thus, there would not be enough energy produced by them in order to keep the electricity on throughout the country.
In order for solar panels to produce energy for an entire year, 127 square miles is needed. They would also have to be covered with movable mirrors, be washed every few days in order to remain efficient, and have a natural gas back-up system when it is cloudy or when the sun sets.
As for wind turbines, the amount of land needed would be a mile-wide path extending at least 400 miles in order to provide energy for an entire year. Meanwhile, such turbines allegedly have killed thousands of birds and bats, thus setting off a “green” civil war between environmentalists and animal-rights activists. In order to resolve the matter, some environmentalists claim that replacing smaller turbines with larger turbines will prevent birds and bats from being killed. However, such larger turbines will require taking more space, especially if hundreds of them are built across the country in order to produce enough energy for the entire year.
In conclusion, oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power are less costly, more efficient, and (believe it or not) more environmentally-friendly than solar and wind power.
