The Democratic Party’s 2016 platform has done away with calls for an “all of the above” energy policy, instead embracing a goal of getting half of America’s power from “clean energy” within a decade.
The phrase “all of the above” does not appear once in the 2016 platform, but the phrase “clean energy,” referring to wind and solar power, appears 27 times and references positive phrases such as “jobs,” “economy,” “superpower,” and “leadership.” The document dedicates an entire section of its table of contents to “Creating Good-Paying Clean Energy Jobs.”
The party’s energy commitment was stricken from a draft of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform shortly before the convention under pressure from anti-fracking activists and environmental groups.
The 2012 Democratic platform embraced an energy policy which sought to develop all America’s energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas. President Barack Obama’s campaign ran political ads attacking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for saying that “coal kills people” in 2003, and the campaign highlighted Obama’s commitment to coal power.
The DNC’s platform now calls for having the nation run “entirely on clean energy by midcentury,” with a goal of “getting 50 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources within a decade.” A draft of the platform is available on the official website of the Democratic National Convention.
America isn’t even close to getting enough energy from wind and solar power to achieve this goal, despite extremely lucrative subsidies, according to an analysis of federal data conducted earlier this month by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Wind and solar power provided 4.7 and 0.6 of all electricity produced in America in 2015 respectively, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Hydropower and biofuels account for 6 and 1.6 percent of all electricity generated last year, but both are increasingly targeted by the green movement, difficult to rapidly expand and dependent upon regional conditions.
Andrew Follett is a contributer for the Daily Caller. This content was provided by the Daily Caller News Foundation