Why Democrats Make Energy Expensive (And Dirty)

Progressives say they care more about working people and climate change than Republicans and moderate Democrats. Why, then, do they advocate policies that make energy expensive and dirty?

Progressive Democrats including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the head of the House progressive caucus, have sent a letter demanding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) investigate whether “market manipulation” is causing natural gas prices to rise 30 percent on average for consumers over last winter, an astonishing $746 per household.

But the main reason natural gas prices are rising is because progressives have been so successful in restricting natural gas production. Sanders, Jayapal, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), as individuals and as part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have successful fought to restrict natural gas production through fracking and to block natural gas pipelines, including the Atlantic Coast pipeline.

In 2020, Sanders celebrated efforts by progressives to cancel the Atlantic Coast pipeline. Today, New England is facing rolling blackouts and importing natural gas from Russia. “Getting [natural] gas to [progressive Senators Ed] Markey and [Elizabeth] Warren’s Massachusetts is so difficult,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “that sometimes it comes into Boston Harbor on a tanker from Russia.”

Bernie Sanders @SenSanders

This is a major victory for the millions-strong climate justice movement, which fought for years to stop this pipeline. Together, we will secure clean air and good jobs building a renewable-energy economy that protects the only planet we have. Energy companies cancel construction of Atlantic Coast PipelineDominion Energy and Duke Energy have canceled their Atlantic Coast Pipeline project, a natural gas pipeline that was to stretch hundreds of miles across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, citing “legal uncertainty.”cnn.com

July 6th 2020

1,033 Retweets5,760 Likes

Democrats aren’t the only reason the United States isn’t producing enough natural gas to keep prices at the same low levels they’ve been at for the past decade. There is higher demand as the economy emerges from covid. There is greater demand for natural gas internationally due to a bad year for wind energy in Europe. And President Joe Biden, for his part, has resisted many progressive demands to restrict oil and gas production.

But the main reason there isn’t enough natural gas production is because of successful progressive Democratic efforts to restrict natural gas production in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world in the name of fighting climate change, as I was one of the first to report last fall. Sanders and Jayapal talk about “market manipulation” and “profiteering” but to the extent there is any of either it’s because of inadequate supplies of natural gas and the pipelines to transport it.

Successful shareholder activism, known in the industry as “ESG” for environmental, social, and governance issues, resulted in less investment in oil and gas production, and more weather-dependent renewables, which result in higher prices everywhere they are deployed at scale. Even ESG champions including Financial Times, Goldman Sachs, and Bloomberg all now acknowledge that it was climate activist shareholder efforts that restricted oil and gas investment.

Such efforts also directly led to increasing carbon emissions. Last year saw a whopping 17 percent increase in coal-fired electricity, which resulted in a six percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions. It was the first annual increase in coal use since 2014. The reason for it was because of the scarcity and higher price of natural gas, coal’s direct replacement, not just in the U.S. but globally, since the US exports a significant quantity of natural gas.

The other reason the U.S. used more coal in 2021 is because progressive Democrats are shutting down nuclear plants. “When a nuclear plant is closed, it’s closed forever,” noted Mark Nelson of Radiant Energy Fund, an energy analytics firm, “whereas coal plants can afford to operate at relatively low levels of capacity, like just 30 to 50 percent operation, and thus wait for natural gas prices, and thus demand for coal, to rise.”

Progressives like Sanders, Jayapal, and AOC claim to care more about poor people, working people, and climate change than either Republicans or moderate Democrats, who they defeat in Democratic primary elections. Why, then, do they advocate policies that make energy expensive and dirty?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC

Fracking is bad, actually

October 8th 2020

81,570 Retweets648,545 Likes

A big part of the reason progressives make energy expensive appears to be that they just don’t know very much about energy. The fact that they are demanding that FERC investigate higher prices suggests they want to keep energy prices low. But it could also mean that their letter is just public relations cover so they are not blamed for raising energy prices.

Indeed, it would be naive to think that Sanders and other progressives didn’t realize that blocking pipelines, opposing fracking, and subsidizing renewables would make energy expensive, given that making energy expensive has been the highest goal of their main climate advisor, Bill McKibben, who subscribes to the Malthusian view that there are too many humans and we must restrict energy and development.

If renewables were cheaper than the status quo then the policies they advocate — no permitting of pipelines, restrictions on fracking, and subsidies for renewables — would not be necessary. Besides, mainstream energy experts and journalists today admit that weather-dependent renewables make electricity expensive…

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Related Topics:#AOC #BernieSanders #DemocratsMakeEnergyExpensiveAndDirty #MichaelShellenberger #PramilaJayapal

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Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

Published on November 13, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.

Let’s look at the data.

The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.

Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.

The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.

Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.

For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.

These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.

Authors:

Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

Daily Caller

Climate Change Fanaticism Was The Big Election Loser

Published on November 13, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”

He had that right.

Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.

It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.

The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.

But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.

Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.

Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.

Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue-signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross that the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower income Americans bear to stop global warming.

Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.

It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned the voters against climate crusaders like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.

It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives who are out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government, seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.

The good news is this year’s voter revolts against the radical green agenda are not a vote for dirtier air or water. The air that we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that President Donald Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.

To try to sell middle America on the climate-change agenda of abolishing fossil fuels, the greens peddled bogus arguments that climate change would hurt poor communities most. In reality the financial costs of the climate policies and the paychecks lost were felt by the non-elite.

Democrats forgot to visit the steel-mill construction sites or the auto plants or the oil patch and ask those workers what they thought.

Well, now we know the reality. Americans think their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear-and-present danger. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is titled: “The Trump Economic Miracle.”