An informative and eye-opening report, "Protecting the Environment from the Green New Deal," by Paul Driessen is a must read issue paper.  It was released last month by The Heartland Institute and discusses the environmental damage the Green New Deal (GND) would cause to the United States if fully implemented.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The GND, advocated by Rep. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and other global warming adherents like Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), would cause enormous environmental damage to our nation.

Everyone has heard about the GND outrageous costs, estimated to be somewhere between $52 to $93 trillion over 10 years, according to a March 2019 analyses by the American Action Forum.  The deal envisions that fossil fuel and nuclear energy would be replaced with “clean” renewable energy, chiefly wind turbines and solar panels, in some Don Quixote-like effort to save the world from supposed global warming caused by ever increasing CO₂ from man’s use of fossil fuel.

As author Paul Driessen points out, solar power and wind turbines produce limited energy compared to fossil fuels and nuclear energy and have huge footprints for the power they do produce.  For example, the 14-megawatt photovoltaic solar power facility at Nellis Airforce Base in Nevada generates 32,000 megawatt-hours of electricity annually, 33 percent of its rated capacity because the sun does not shine 24 hours every day.  The facility contains 72,000 solar panels on 140 acres.  Conversely, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona generates 29.48 million megawatt-hours from three nuclear reactors, 920 times more electricity than Nellis Airforce base and does it 24 hours a day on less land.

If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez got her wish and replaced all fossil fuel and nuclear power with solar panels, it would require 18.7 billion panels and a land mass the size of New York and Vermont, combined.

The same can be said with wind turbines.  Driessen writes that a modern, natural gas turbine combined-cycle power plant can produce 600 megawatts of electricity 24 hours a day, every day, for 90 percent of the year, on less than 100 acres.  An industrial wind energy plant in Indiana, Fowler Ridge, produces about the same amount of electrical energy with 355 wind turbines on 50,000 acres, or 78 square miles.

Mr. Driessen also discusses many of the other environmental hazards associated with “clean” energy like the toxic chemicals used to produce solar panels and the thousands of birds and bats killed by wind turbines.  Imagine the land that would be needed to build these colossal structures to replace our energy supply.

The policy brief also discusses the GND’s “faulty premises” such as the “computer model predictions of such warming have been repeatedly proven wrong by real world empirical observations” and how the earth has cooled and warmed over the centuries due to natural processes ever since Earth developed an atmosphere.

This is an issue paper you need to read.  Hopefully, it will cause climate scare mongers to take a deep breath, blow off some harmless CO₂, stop frightening people, and begin to listen to other scientists that believe our lovely and resilient Earth is not doomed.