Americans Are ‘Collateral Damage’ In Dems’ Insane War On Energy

Maybe the Jan. 6 hearings are, as some assert, really about distracting Americans from the Democrats’ shocking policy failures. How else can one explain the refusal of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress to address our ongoing energy crisis?

And, no, it’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis. With consumer prices rising at a four-decade-high of 8.6% in the most recent year-over-year comparison, Americans are watching their standard of living fall fast.

A just-released national survey has found that 83% of U.S. households are cutting their personal spending and travel due to soaring inflation. These cutbacks are being driven almost entirely by energy costs, which have spiked nearly 35% in the past year.

The economic disaster Biden has created is ultimately a result of surging federal spending during the pandemic, foolish Fed policies that poured monetary gasoline onto a raging inflation fire, and the ongoing effort by Biden and the Democrats to punish the very companies that provide our energy, threatening them with smothering regulations, painful taxes and even public shaming.

Things have reached a fever pitch of late, with Democrats’ extremist anti-free-market green wing suggesting, as gasoline prices roar past $5 a gallon and cities across the nation face blackouts, we would all be better off if we just nationalized our oil and gas industry.

For the record, no we wouldn’t.

Some 90% of the world’s oil assets are already controlled by governments, and therefore the global crude-oil market is a dysfunctional mess. Enterprising private-sector oil firms are the one bright spot in all this. They travel the world, find new oil, refine it, deliver it thousands of miles away, and, in normal times, charge less per gallon for gasoline than for bottled water.

“Nationalizing” such success is economic insanity.

Don’t tell Biden, who just returned from a G7 meeting where plans were laid to create a “Climate Club” of nations to take “joint action” on CO2 emissions.

Specifically, leaders agreed to “a highly decarbonised road sector by 2030” and “a fully or predominantly decarbonised power sector by 2035.” Transnational socialism. Good luck with that.

One of the signatories of that deal, Germany, already has had to revert to using coal after closing its nuclear plants, while another, France, has just declared an energy emergency. At least the French plan to build nuclear power plants to bolster their energy grid.

But Biden has nothing to brag about. He entered office in a country that was self-sufficient in energy yet now has to go hat-in-hand begging the likes of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and other OPEC pariahs to sell us more oil. Americans are paying a steep price for this crash program to “decarbonize” our economy.

The irony is that so-called “green” energy such as solar and wind, can’t fill the needs of growing economies. So countries are moving back to coal, undoing decades of CO2 reductions.

It’s easy to see how this happened. “The (Biden) administration is shutting down and blocking pipelines, greatly restricting oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands, slow walking LNG export permits, and issuing sweeping climate disclosure rules to discourage investment in the industry,” Real Clear Energy noted recently.

Worse, playing off public anger, Biden, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and climate change czar John Kerry have repeatedly and dishonestly attacked the energy industry, suggesting it should be shut down or, equally bad, accusing companies of “profiteering” and “greed.”

In such an overtly hostile environment, what sane CEO would commit huge sums of investment to more energy production?

As David Harsanyi recently wrote at The Daily Wire:

Virtually every left-wing energy proposal in the past two decades, if not longer, has been designed to create false scarcity, either through fabricated marketplaces and stringent regulations or by putting caps on production. This is what they wanted.  

‘No more drilling on federal lands,’ Biden promised during the 2020 presidential campaign. ‘No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, No. 1.’

Not No. 2. No. 1.

‘No more — no new fracking,’ the president also said.

Shameful. And far worse than what happened on Jan. 6 in the nation’s capital, now the subject of televised hearings. Because, unless there are major unforeseen advances in energy technology, Biden’s plan to cut CO2 emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and by 100% by 2050 is simply not achievable. And we’ll all be poorer for it.

And not even our own government believes this, as its own forecasts show.

The “net-zero emissions” extremism will damage the next generation’s prospects of living better than its parents did – a long-cherished promise of American life that, unless our current course toward energy poverty alters, will disappear.

The “New Green Deal” and “net-zero emissions” and other extremist climate change shams are already devastating both the U.S. and global economies. For the sake of all, it’s time to end the Democrats’ dangerous war on energy.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board