The Green Chickens...

... Have Come Home To Roost

Under my plan... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. - Barack Obama, 2008.

We can't just drill our way to lower gas prices. - Barack Obama, 2012.

Obama's plan, a cap-and-trade scheme on carbon emissions, didn't happen. So, electricity prices didn't skyrocket under his watch. We did, however, drill our way to lower gas prices. The fracking boom saw to that, and briefly brought America to net-exporter status.

Unfortunately, for all but the humanity-hating greens among us, Obama's doddering second-in-command and/or whoever is feeding policy ideas into his teleprompter have finally started to skyrocket energy costs.

Obama's idea was to tip the economic scales in favor of Wind-and-Solar-and-Battery-Idiocy (WaSaBI) by making carbon energy more expensive. His Kinsley Gaffe revealed his true purpose - not to be a public servant, but to be a political overlord, doing unto us rather than making our lives better.

Biden learned well at his boss's knee. He is succeeding where Obama failed. Executive orders and other bureaucratic policies are choking off natural gas, oil, and coal exploration, harvesting, and use at a time when having robust access to these energy sources would be of enormous benefit, given the Ukraine war, given the Middle East's gleeful hand-rubbing over skyrocketing prices, and given Europe's junkie's dependence on Russian energy exports.

Their approach to "greening" America's energy economy is nothing short of idiotic. A reasonable person doesn't starve a nation before setting up the new food supply, and WaSaBI is very, very far from being ready for prime time. But, politicians aren't reasonable. The attitude is "we'll force change, and let the beleaguered private sector figure it all out.

That 'figuring out' rolls back to Obama's admission. If you choke off supply of X, and Y isn't ready to take its place, then prices are going to go up. That's basic economics, and it's as sure as gravity and the tides.

The problem is, our lefty politicians do not believe in basic economics. Their dislike of capitalism has given them the mistaken idea that market forces are merely a choice, and sufficient will can override them. Yet, even in the Soviet Union and Red China, market forces made themselves felt. Even in prison, where everything is controlled, market forces make themselves felt. They are hindered in countless ways, but they are never thwarted. All those hindrances do is introduce inefficiency, which is a sterile way of saying government causes people to pay more for less.

Our endlessly baffling President is actually proud of the spike in energy prices:

[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.

Is the message that, once we're all driving battery-powered cars and plugging them in at night to charge from solar panels (when the sun doesn't shine) or windmills (we hope the wind is blowing!), everything will be cheap and easy and back to the normal we enjoyed for the last few years? If the math worked out this way, why force the change prematurely? Why not simply let the WaSaBI grow on its own, and have the transition occur organically?

No, the reality is that higher energy costs are a permanent feature of their desired outcome. They expect us to get used to this "new normal," because it's the only way their fantastical notions have any chance of being realized. That's before we get into the scaling problems of WaSaBI - the technology simply doesn't exist to displace gas, oil, coal, and nuclear. And, that's before we get into the reality that, even if they could zero-carbon America, it'd not make a hill-of-beans difference in global temps a century from now.

We are a few months from a mid-term election that is forecast to be a severe drubbing for the Democrats, with oddsmakers heavily favoring the GOP to take control of both houses of Congress. The Democrats are finally waking up to this, in a panic. Their responses? Blame everything but the obvious for higher gas and electricity prices: Russia, greedy oil companies, and other things 'beyond their control,' and suggest that they can bully oil and gas prices back down by threatening and taxing the people who harvest and sell the stuff. As well, they're seeking to tip the elections their way with gerrymandering excess (so egregious in New York that a judge threw out the Democrats' map in favor of a neutral one), duplicitous fear-mongering, and anything else they can think of.

Except the obvious: Nary a one of them is pondering any reversal of their anti-carbon energy policies, and they are even resisting a U-turn on nuclear power.

Many people like the idea of "green..." until it hits them in their wallets. Cheap energy is the health of a modern society, while expensive energy cascades across the landscape like a tsunami. Everything gets more expensive, and that expense hits the poor and working classes hardest. Coupled with the devaluation of the dollar due to massive over-printing (where's that Modern Monetary Theory now?), you get a populace very unhappy with the current political leadership.

The Democrats' green chickens are coming home to roost.

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Peter.