Leaping before you look is how tragedies happen. Yet when it comes to Michigan’s transition from reliables to renewables in the energy market, that’s the plan.

Michigan’s energy transition is being carried out with messianic zeal, not a weighing of risks and trade-offs. With one-party Democratic rule, Official Michigan is an echo chamber, where leaders are rushing headlong into the future, whether or not the future is ready.

Senate Bill 271 requires Michigan energy companies to hold 100% renewable energy portfolios by 2035. That’s up from 11% in 2021.

The bill specifically puts nuclear energy off-limits until 2035.

“Renewable energy resource does not include petroleum, nuclear, natural gas, or coal,” the bill reads.

That changes in 2035.

“A renewable energy plan starting in 2035 credits approved nuclear energy toward the clean energy requirement or renewable portfolio plan,” the bill reads.

What makes nuclear energy dirty in 2034 and clean in 2035? Politics.

This is a way for the green energy people to give themselves an out. In 2035, something will have to power Michigan’s homes and businesses. Inclusion of nuclear is as good as an admission that wind and solar are not that thing.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer does not approach nuclear energy with the ambivalence of Senate Bill 271; she has embraced it. Whitmer went to bat to get a West Michigan nuclear plant, Palisades, the federal funding it needs to reopen.

It took two tries, but federal officials — including former Michigan governor now U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — eventually softened their hearts toward Palisades.

Whitmer believes there should be two million electric vehicles on Michigan roads by 2030.

The road from 17,500 EVs in Michigan in 2021 to two million in 2030 will be paved with taxpayer money.

This includes $150 million for electric school buses or $65 million for charging resources or $48 million in sales and use tax abatements for EV buyers. All of these appear on her 2024 budget wishlist. That doesn’t include the federal support for charging resources and $7,500 tax credits for most EV buyers.

Even if Whitmer succeeds, she and Granholm will be competing with each other for the same finite pool of minerals. At a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Granholm envisioned an all-EV military fleet by 2030.

The federal government, the U.S. military, every blue state and every automaker will be seeking massive amounts of electric vehicles, all at the same time. This will raise the cost of the rare minerals needed to produce EV batteries, and this will enrich China.

When you hear the word “EVs” or “solar panels,” you should also hear the word China, because that’s who we’ll buy the materials from.

Relying on China for Prius batteries is one thing; relying on it to power Jeeps and tanks is quite another. The Granholm plan would elevate the minerals shortage from a problem for consumers and car-buyers to a matter of national security.

From Lansing to Washington to the military, the green energy transition lacks sobriety and thoughtfulness.

James David Dickson is managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential. Email him at dickson@mackinac.org.

Government leaders and activists want control of your children. The most recent tell was when President Joe Biden said in April, “There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation's children are all our children.”

Biden’s remarks came during an event to honor teachers of the year. He criticized parents who want to ensure that inappropriate books are not shelved in their children’s schools. It is not the first time a politician has said, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and it appears to be a growing sentiment.

Sarah Jones, senior writer for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, wrote an April 8 commentary that carried the headline “Children Are Not Property.”

Jones consistently makes wildly inaccurate claims in her piece, which casts conservatives as dangerous people.

“Like any piece of property, a child has value to conservative activists. They are key to a future the conservative wants to win. Parental rights are merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all,” Jones writes.

Jones writes, “Because parents own their children, they can dispose of the child as they see fit.” She cites as one example a recent Arkansas law that loosens work restrictions on minors. Conservatives are behind an effort to put children to work in dangerous workplaces such as meat-packing plants and construction sites, she writes.

Jones neglects to note that when children work, it is usually out of economic necessity, as the National Institute of Health reports. Statistics also show that the majority of low-income households identify as Democrats, which suggests that it isn’t conservatives who send children to work.

Whether and when minors work should not be a partisan issue. Letting a child work as a way to learn a good work ethic is not child abuse. The alternative is likely children sitting at home watching television or playing on electronics.

Jones writes, “When a child goes hungry, that’s because a parent isn’t caring for their property — and what a person does with their property is their right.”

Neglect, of course, is against the law. Parents don’t just get to treat their kids as private property, which Jones claims is the case.

Homeschooling, grounded in the principle of parental abuse, comes in for a special attack in the article. “There are ways to circumvent a child’s established right to an education, as conservatives know,” Jones writes. “Homeschooling laws are so lax in the U.S. that thousands of children have essentially disappeared into an academic void.”

A recent Harvard study concludes that homeschooled children are happier and have fewer mental health issues than children who attend public schools. They also scored 15 to 25 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests. In fact, Black homeschooled students scored 23% to 42% higher on tests than their public-school peers.

But lax education isn’t the greatest risk of homeschooling, Jones darkly warns: “Taken to extremes, the concept of parental rights can be dangerous and even deadly for children.”

“Ignore the basic fact that the home is often no refuge but a place of domination and abuse,” Jones writes. “The National Children’s Alliance says that over 600,000 children were documented victims of abuse and neglect in 2020. In 77 percent of substantiated cases, a parent committed the abuse.”

There were, by these statistics, 462,000 cases of child abuse and neglect at the hands of a parent in 2020. There were, in the same year, 73 million children in the United States, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Any abuse is too much abuse, but that comes to 0.006% of children. Fewer than one percent of American children were abused or neglected in 2020 by parents, but for Jones that makes all parents suspects.

Jones repeatedly asserts that conservative parents mistreat their children. What happens when there’s more government involvement? The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform conducted studies on how governments treat wards of the state. The studies found that “real family preservation programs have a better record for safety than foster care.”

“In group homes there was more than ten times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse as in the general population,” one study reads.

Children are best off under their parents’ tutelage.

“Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility,” Jones concludes.

That would be the worst outcome of all. Wards of the state do not live well.

Jamie A. Hope is assistant managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential. Email her at hope@mackinac.org.