For the first time in many months, Joe Biden finally sat down for a formal interview. Unfortunately, it wasn’t with a hard-hitting journalist willing to ask him tough questions about the issues of today. Instead, it was an actor and former Obama official named Kal Penn, who you may remember from the “Harold and Kumar” movies, who did the honors. That the interview was aired on Comedy Central simply provided the final bit of irony.
So did they talk about the recent bank collapses, the staggering inflation, the high-interest rates, the meltdown in Middle East relations, or even the border crisis? Nah, they talked about gay marriage and climate change, because those are apparently the pressing issues of our time, not affording things like eggs and not being nuked.
Biden’s tale is ridiculous for several reasons. For one, the idea that he was a senior in high school (sometime around 1960) and two “well-dressed men in suits” in Delaware just starting to make out in public is so farcical as to be immediately dismissed. That’s just not a thing that happened.
Regardless, the second thing that makes this ridiculous is that it’s an obvious, disprovable lie. If Biden actually had his epiphany about gay marriage as an 18-year-old senior in high school, why did he vote to protect traditional marriage in 1996? Further, why did he oppose gay marriage all the way up until he became vice president? Did he just forget about his epiphany?
He lies about the stupidest things, and that continued with his claims about climate change.
There are several falsehoods to unpack in those two clips. The first involves the claim that climate change has somehow been responsible for the forest fires of the last several years. In fact, almost all of them were a result of either human sabotage (i.e. setting the fire) or severe mismanagement of ground brush under the guise of environmentalism. Supposed rises in temperature are not causing forests to spontaneously combust, and in the case of California, the state has been seeing record rainfall, not worsening drought.
Evidence that the world is going to simply cease to function due to a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees celsius over the next century (which is the projection he’s citing) simply doesn’t exist. For all the doom-saying, hotter temperatures have tended to benefit humanity throughout history because the cold makes it harder to obtain food and it causes far more deaths due to exposure. The scientific community should be doing serious studies into whether rising temperatures would actually save lives, but they refuse to do that because then the climate change grift would dry up.
Finally, Biden’s claim that “we” hooked a Massachusetts coal power plant up to wind technology and that it got magically cheaper is not true. As far as I can tell, the Somerset power plant, which is what he’s referencing isn’t even operating. Past that, some more searching reveals that the claim about it being cheaper is based on 1) receiving subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and 2) and ignoring ongoing maintenance and inefficiency issues with wind power.
In other words, is it cheaper to build a wind farm with a bunch of federal government subsidies than it is to continue to run a coal power plant, including future projections of maintenance? Possibly. But is it cheaper for consumers who actually pay for the electricity? Not even close, as actual real-world prices testify to again and again. Wind power is inefficient because the wind is not always blowing, thus it creates scarcity that raises prices compared to coal. Wind power is also not without its own maintenance issues.
Think of it this way. If these renewable projects were so great and so financially sound, why would they require government subsidies? And why would the President of the United States have to continually lie about them? The simple answer is that’s just what he does. Biden is a liar, and there’s no lie too small that he won’t tell if he thinks it helps him politically.