The terrible effects of the presidential candidate’s plan to ban fracking wouldn’t be limited to the economy.

Editor’s Note: The following is the final installment of a three-part series adapted from David L. Bahnsen’s new book, Elizabeth Warren: How Her Presidency Would Destroy the Middle Class and the American Dream. Part I is here; part II is here.

What if a self-proclaimed environmental advocate produced a radical and costly plan to save the environment . . . that actually harmed the environment? Elizabeth Warren’s obsession with banning fracking, and other means and methods of energy that have played a key role in diminishing pollution, would accomplish precisely that.

American electricity generation has gone from 50 percent coal-based to 28 percent in a decade and is projected to be just 17 percent in 30 years. This, of course, has been made possible by American production of natural gas, which has skyrocketed as a source of electricity generation.

Renewables account for just 18 percent of electricity production. Even the most delusional, optimistic projections about the growth of renewables don’t predict anything more than 35 percent of electricity needs being met by renewables for decades. With $6.7 billion a year of subsidies to renewables, wind and solar still remain completely uncompetitive from a cost standpoint, and of course their weather-dependent intermittent nature makes them undependable as a source of electricity.

I oppose the $489 million of subsidies paid out to the fossil-fuel industry annually, but paying 14 times that amount to subsidize renewables has done exactly one thing: provide tax credits to reward well-heeled economic actors and distort the energy marketplace. Price discovery has long been absent from the renewable-energy space, as talented entrepreneurs endeavor to secure government tax breaks, not to innovate and, least of all, to create a profitable (sustainable) enterprise. Industries with long-term sustainability attract profit-driven actors; the players in industries reliant on government-crony handouts seek to game the system and have infinite incentives to delay the successful achievement of a goal.