The Hill | Madison Gesiotto | October 28, 2019

The Democratic Party seems to not really care about saving our planet. The presidential candidates continue to prove this by proposing energy policies that would devastate the American economy while ignoring the appalling impact of Chinese pollution on the global atmosphere.

Marianne Williamson declared that we need to act “radically” to avert “massive food shortages” and “hundreds of millions of environmental refugees.” As unhinged as she sounds, she is stating the Democratic Party platform as dictated by progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Williamson is not even an outlier among her fellow candidates, many of whom have already endorsed the preposterous Green New Deal.

Some candidates have even crafted their own versions of the Green New Deal, but the most frightening manifestation of such climate extremism is that some candidates are now pledging to ban fossil fuels, a move that would dramatically raise energy prices in places such as Ohio, which is among the top states that consumer natural gas in the country.

“We will address the catastrophic crisis of climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel,” Bernie Sanders said during the presidential debate in Texas. Elizabeth Warren, another leading face of the Democratic Party, pledged to “sign an executive order that puts a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases for drilling offshore and on public lands” and then released a plan to ban fracking across the country.

A fracking ban would tear a gaping hole through the fabric of the Ohio economy, which has benefited greatly from the shale boom. An Ohio University professor calculated that the shale industry contributed more than $22 billion to the state economy and supported nearly 150,000 jobs in 2015 alone, and that was before the energy boom we have experienced here since President Trump began rolling back the draconian Obama era regulations that kept our energy sector from reaching full potential.

Behind the scenes, longshot candidates such as Beto O’Rourke, who has come out with his own multitrillion dollar plan to “free ourselves from a dependence on fossil fuels and embrace renewable wind and solar energy technology,” are doing their best to keep pace with the front runners. While these proposals are understandably terrifying for Ohioans, they represent the sort of damage that elicits standing ovations in Beijing. For all their talk of environmental protections, the Democrats are shockingly unconcerned about the devastating carbon footprint left by China.

Read the full op-ed here.