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Biden environmental agenda under fire for increasing costs for Americans

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6 minute read

From The Center Square

By Casey Harper

The Biden administration’s energy policies are increasingly costly for Americans, a newly released report says.

U.S. House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., released the report, which argues Biden’s energy policies have increased costs for Americans and hurt the economy.

“The Biden Administration weaponized the power of the executive branch to wage a war against American-made energy production and cement in place radical, far-left energy policies that jeopardize domestic energy development, overload America’s power grid, and raise costs on all American consumers and businesses,” Comer said in a statement.

In particular, President Joe Biden’s recent pause on liquefied natural gas exports, elevated gas prices, and the aggressive push toward transitioning toward electric energy are among the main criticisms lobbed at Biden.

Comer’s office cites analysis from the right-leaning American Action Forum released in April. AAF reports that in 2024 alone, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, as of the end of April, had proposed 38 new rules and finalized 63 rules. According to AAF, those rules total 33,138 pages and will cost the U.S. economy over a trillion dollars.

The report also highlights the cost of pushing America’s energy needs increasingly to the electric grid.

From the report:

Even as use efficiency improves, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects U.S. utility-generated electricity demand to continue growing at an average annual rate of one percent through 2050. But radical new policies and regulations promulgated by the Biden Administration seek to transform power generation and electricity markets. The Biden Administration is moving to replace highly reliable and affordable existing sources of energy with new sources that are typically less reliable and more expensive. For consumers, the results of these initiatives will predictably be higher costs on utility bills, higher costs for goods and services that consume electricity, invisible energy subsidy costs paid through income and other taxes, as well as economic costs as high electricity prices push some business opportunities overseas.

The White House has cited climate change concerns as it rolled out several policies, including a pause on new export sites for liquefied natural gas.

That LNG pause has been particularly controversial, with a coalition of state and Congressional leaders rallying opposition against it. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality has been filed by a coalition of states.

Biden’s Department of Energy has defended the decision and stressed that it will not stop any currently existing sales. The White House has also argued that the U.S. is already a leading exporter without new sales.

“Before issuing any new LNG export decisions, DOE is embarking on a transparent process to ensure we are using the most up-to-date economic and environmental analyses to determine whether additional approvals of LNG exports to non-FTA countries are in the ‘public interest,” the DOE said in a February post defending the decision.

Meanwhile, federal climate-related spending has come under fire.

During a news conference last week, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., sparked headlines by exposing that federal funds went to a climate group that was actively supporting the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, an attack that included rape, killing children, and hostage-taking.

“We went to the website of Climate Justice Alliance. This is what we found on the website that our taxpayer dollars are going to organizations such as this,” she said, referencing a pro-Hamas photo reportedly found on the group’s website.

Comer’s reports come as Biden’s Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, took questions from lawmakers last week about Biden’s energy policies.

Republicans took her to task for the increased costs Americans are facing. Energy costs have risen over 35% since Biden took office, according to federal data.

During the hearing, Granholm defended her agency’s work, including Biden’s decision to drain the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve earlier in his term to help address soaring gas prices.

“The Administration remains committed to maintaining a robust and well-functioning SPR. In 2022, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting disruptions in the oil market, the President directed the sale of 180 million barrels,” Granholm said in her written testimony. submitted to the committee. “The emergency sales provided supply certainty and acted as a bridge until domestic production increased, which in turn helped to mitigate the cost increases for American families.”

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Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

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JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

WATCH:

With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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