Thanks to 13 Republicans in the House and 19 in the Senate, President Joe Biden finally chalked up a victory with the passage of a $1.2 trillion so-called infrastructure bill. Of course, not everyone was happy. Conservatives know the legislation is a big boondoggle. And it still didn’t give the climate alarmists everything they demanded, but now that they’ve got their foot in the door the next step is to knock that door down.

The Hill reports that “some advocates say the bill does not go far enough and called on lawmakers to quickly pass what is known as the Build Back Better Act, which includes a bulk of other climate-centered provisions.” Indeed, Democrats have always tied the much larger bill to the “infrastructure” bill, which is why the support of those Republicans is so problematic.

But it doesn’t take long to see that the provisions Democrats demand will decimate America’s energy production and independence, leaving countries like China free to keep their industrial and economic engine moving at full speed. Never mind Biden’s phony climate deal with Xi Jinping.

“The legislation contains actions like tax credits for clean energy and electric vehicles, and a program aimed at reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production,” The Hill adds. “It also contains additional environmental provisions like additional funding for lead pipe removal, repealing drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge and a ban on drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.”

With gas prices up 60% already this year, the last thing America needs is to become more dependent on other countries for our energy needs, but that’s exactly what the Biden administration wants.

Case in point: When Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was asked recently about what she’s going to do about rising gas prices, she couldn’t help but laugh.

But the Green New Deal is no laughing matter.

As long as these environmental extremists hold political leverage in Washington, they’ve made it perfectly clear they’re willing to kill American industries and jobs. And they’re not wasting any time. Days after Biden’s political victory, The Wall Street Journal says, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “proceeded to make the case for the even larger multitrillion-dollar budget reconciliation bill, featuring hundreds of billions of dollars in additional climate-related spending.”

“The White House now demands two once-in-a-generation green spending blowouts in the space of two weeks,” the Journal adds, despite the fact that CO₂ emissions in the United States are at a 32-year low. “Taxpayers may shudder to think what December will bring and are left with one big question with generational consequences: Why is it that people obsessed with climate risks seem to have no concern for financial risks?”

And those financial risks are staggering.

Just last year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a comprehensive report on the Green New Deal, concluding: “The Green New Deal is a plan to radically reshape the American economy that would affect every American household. The proposal would impose significant new costs on every aspect of how we live and work.”

CEI’s analysis estimates the costs of the Green New Deal to be as much as $75,000 per household in the first year alone. And a report from the American Action Forum tallied the long-term costs of the green new scheme at $51 to $93 trillion dollars.

This month, environmentalists and those who use environmentalism to push a radical, economy-crushing political agenda met in Scotland for the week-long United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their agenda is cloaked in alarmism over melting ice caps and rising seas, as well as calls for immediate action to save the planet from irreversible damage.

They keep saying we have only a few years to save the world. But like Al Gore’s infamous climate apocalypse warning, the dire predictions never pan out.

The problem is they keep moving the goalposts, and every time those posts are moved the rest of us are asked to sacrifice more of our money and freedom. We should be glad the climate extremists in Congress didn’t get all of what they wanted this time, but don’t think for a second they’ve given up on their plan to use climate alarmism to gain more power.