Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Bernie Sanders’s $16 Trillion Green New Deal is doomed to fail & impoverish millions. How do I know? For starters, I helped create the last one.

The only Green New Deals that have worked were done with nuclear, which Bernie’s would ban, not renewables

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on our Green New Deal, nearly half of which went to renewables. An appalling sum — $24 billion — was spent on biofuels, even though everyone knew that they pollute more than fossil fuels & destroy rainforests.

Another $15 billion went to energy efficiency, which turned out to be a massive waste of money.

Twice as much money was spent weatherizing homes as was saved. The episode disproved the widely parroted myth that efficiency investments always “pay for themselves.”

Just look at California and Germany. Had they spent on nuclear what they instead spent on renewables, both places today would already have 100% clean power.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Look at France and Sweden. In the 1970s and 1980s, they built nuclear plants. Sweden gets 95% of its electricity from zero-carbon sources, 42% from nuclear. France generates 88% of its electricity from zero-carbon, 72% from nuclear.

If you want wages to rise — and Bernie and the Democrats say they do — then you should want energy to be cheap, not expensive.

Expensive electricity retards economic growth, which puts downward pressure on wages. By contrast, cheap energy increases growth and raises wages.

And guess what? Renewables make electricity expensive everywhere for the same reason: they are unreliable and energy dilute

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

It’s not surprising that renewables make electricity expensive. That’s been the goal of greens like Bernie for nearly 50 years:

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

It gets worse. Renewables are also terrible for the natural environment because they require so much land and hammer wildlife, which is why I changed my mind about them

quillette.com/2019/02/27/why…

For those who prefer video:

Just look at Germany vs France. Germany will have spent $580B to make electricity 2x more expensive & 10x more polluting than electricity in France.

Even Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest magazine, acknowledges the failure of renewables.

We need to learn from history:
The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

You may wonder: why is Bernie so anti-nuclear?

The real reason he and others are opposed to nuclear is because it means we don’t need renewables:

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Look at Bernie’s home state of Vermont.

In 2005, it promised to reduce CO2 25%

Instead, Vermont’s emissions rose 16.3% — 2x as much as national emissions rose during the same period.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…