Colin McNickle At Large

Riding to the ‘rescue’ on a false narrative

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Here we go again (again). As KDKA Radio reported it:

“Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is calling on the federal government to support climate-friendly industrial growth in the Appalachian region and Ohio River valley.

“Peduto, along with mayors from Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, are calling the green transition initiative the ‘Marshall Plan for Middle America’ and they’re looking for $60 billion (a year for 10 years) to fund it.

“The mayor says the plan is non-partisan and based on research from the University of Pittsburgh Center for Sustainable Business, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the City of Pittsburgh, the Steel Valley Authority, the Heartland Capital Strategies Network and the Enel Foundation.”

As Peduto put it:

“For generations, hard-working men and women across the Rust Belt have produced the resources that fueled the U.S. economy. Now, with those jobs and resources evaporating with the realities of climate change, it is time for the U.S. to give back.”

Talk about riding to the “rescue” on the bare back of a false narrative.

Simply put, this plan makes tripe smell and taste good.

Here’s how the “stakeholders” characterize their efforts:

“The Marshall Plan for Middle America (MP4MA) Roadmap is a non-partisan, data-driven research document created through the joint scientific efforts of academic and policy researchers. … The MP4MA Roadmap is intended to provide a platform for regional cooperation across the Ohio Valley without regard for the political party or institutional affiliation of any specific stakeholder.”

Which, of course, sounds a lot like the much ballyhooed “Power of 32” malarkey that died a quick and curiously never-explained death more than a few years ago.

And lest we forget there’s that expected big honkin’ dollop of “tackling … social and environmental injustice” in this group’s planning.

The whole premise behind this latest alphabet soup conglomeration of “green” academia and pols appears to be that, yet again, fossil fuels are bad and must be destroyed.

But this warped iteration of creative, nay, “sustainable,” destruction must be mitigated with “sustainable” energy sources – sustained by more than half-a-trillion dollars, much of that coming from the public kitty.

And after all, if you’re going to kill energy jobs in the fossil-fuel rich region you’re targeting, you have to have organized labor behind you. And what better way to do that than to bribe unions with public dollars, right?

To that end, MP4MA embraces (among other things) “project labor agreements” – essentially the purchase of labor peace with labor cartels and at a premium price – and “prevailing wages,” the practice of paying inflated wages that raise the cost of everything to everybody.

Ah, the price of “sustainability.”

The “irony of ironies” is not lost on Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.

“Liberals and envirocrats have shut down, or keep trying to shut down, the industries that created the lost jobs and now want the feds to pay for replacements,” the Ph.D. economist noted.

“These are precisely the wrong people for this task,” he says.

The real task being cutting through the social re-engineering machinations and mumbo-jumbo and facilitating, not attempting to command, the marketplace that invariably rewards its manipulators with the failure and rebuke they deserve.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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