Gasoline, Electricity, and Biden’s Fuel for the Inflation Fire

This administration's green agenda has fueled the inflation fire that was already raging with the unprecedented government spending in recent years, and there's no imaginable way that prices would come down when everything is toted to market by electric big rigs

Gasoline, Electricity, and Biden’s Fuel for the Inflation Fire – American Thinker<!—->

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August 4, 2022

You may recall that earlier this summer, in response to poor and middle-class Americans’ suffering record gas prices across the country, the Biden administration floated the idea of government-supplied “gas rebate” cards.

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Most of the ideas about money that originate from people who’ve never worked for a company with a profit motive are, naturally, terrible. The one thing that the Biden administration has in spades is people who lack experience working with money that isn’t someone else’s. This is evidenced by the fact that the median years of private sector business experience among his appointees is zero.

Yes, that’s right. Zero.

Supply of gasoline was low in June and the demand for gasoline was high. The result of this was quickly rising gasoline prices. The Biden administration’s proposed “solution” to this problem was to abruptly and artificially increase the demand for gasoline, which was already in short supply, by handing everyone more money to spend on gasoline.

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There is no other possible outcome to such a policy than gasoline prices being driven artificially upward. Seriously, understanding that much isn’t exactly the stuff of advanced economics courses. These are the simplest economic concepts that responsible parents should be teaching their children at an early age.

Did those in Biden administration pitching the “gas rebate” foolishness not get that talk, either at the dinner table or in the hallowed halls of Ivy League academies?

Color me skeptical. I think they know precisely what happens when you artificially increase demand while supply is low. They simply desire such price spikes on gasoline in order to get the poor and middle class on the trolley when it comes to electric vehicles. You know, those cars that mostly rich people drive, and save a ton of money on energy costs, or so we’re told.

That all may sound good until you realize that electricity is, just like gasoline, very much subject to supply limitations to meet demand. If you don’t believe that, ask anyone who was subjected to the “rolling blackouts” in Texas during the deep freeze of 2021. This sort of thing is practically a feature of life during the summer for us here in California, and for the same reason — wind turbines and solar panels may be the magic beans of the green agenda, but they can’t produce anything close to energy output with the reliability of fossil fuels.

So, electricity is in low supply, and not only is the demand so high that prices are spiking, but electric companies cannot even meet the current demand for it. The Biden administration’s “solution” to this is to incentivize the purchase and use of electric vehicles, which, for the average family, would consume four times as much electricity as the average home consumes for air conditioning.

Science writer Stan Cox is among the many left-wing opponents of air conditioning who argue that all the electricity used to power Americans’ air conditioning is “helping push the fast-forward button on global warming.” That’s bad for the planet, we’re incessantly told.

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But even if you cut out air conditioning your home altogether to offset the electricity cost of your fancy new electric vehicles, you’re still consuming three times as much incremental electricity as you did before. Somehow, that’s not “helping push the fast-forward button on global warming,” but it’s good for the planet.

Got that? Good. So, you see, we have to artificially raise the price of gasoline so that people will buy more electric vehicles. Smarmy Pete Buttigieg recently told Americans that “[t]he more pain we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, the more benefit there is more those of us who can access electric vehicles.”

This is little more than fake victimhood and an open expression of contempt for the poor. Just as AOC is in the 94th percentile of income earners at $174K per year and yet demands that her plumber pay off her college loans, Mayor Pete earns $221K annually and suggests that “we are all” feeling this pain at the pumps, so poor folks should just go out and buy a Tesla already.

But in presuming that people will pay less in the long term if everyone drives electric vehicles, he’s wrong. Sure, you may see a slight reduction in cost in the near future. But when the government incentivizes electric vehicle purchases and a hundred million more Americans are driving them, what do you think that will do to electricity prices?

That’s right. The price of the electric energy will skyrocket, just like the price of gas would have skyrocketed if the Biden administration had been able to enact its stupid “gas rebate” policy.

And that’s the “good” outcome of this foolish left-wing crusade. We would have to count ourselves as lucky to only have the prices skyrocket. This would require, though, a massive increase in the use of fossil fuels to meet the surging demand, because despite billions and billions that have been spent subsidizing wind and solar, these renewables can only produce about 12-percent of electricity generation. Nuclear would have a better shot at shoring up the needed juice, given that it accounts for 19-percent of electricity today, but guess what? Leftist wackos kind of hate that, too.

Once again, power companies can’t even meet the current demand for electricity today, without a hundred million more electric cars gorging on the stuff in peoples’ homes every night. It is far likelier that not only would the cost of electricity dramatically increase, but Democrats would continue to demonize the use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and demand greater wind and solar subsidies which are much costlier and less effective.

You can bet there will be countless “rolling blackouts” to ensure equitable suffering beyond the skyrocketing costs.

This is a really, really big deal. If you can’t charge your car, you can’t go to work or drive to the supermarket. This is a tremendous amount of power we’d be surrendering to the government, no pun intended. Maybe during the next outbreak of a novel coronavirus, which totally won’t originate in some American-funded Chinese laboratory like the last one supposedly didn’t, the government can ensure your compliance to lockdown protocols by strategically shutting off your power.

You can’t go out to eat and kill grandmas if you can’t drive to the restaurant, after all.

Not that you’d be able to afford it, anyway. Brandon’s energy killing efforts have already taught Americans that when the price of energy spikes, the price of everything spikes, for everything must travel to market. This administration’s green agenda has fueled the inflation fire that was already raging with the unprecedented government spending in recent years, and there’s no imaginable way that prices would come down when everything is toted to market by electric big rigs, or whatever the hell the leftist eco-fanatics imagine will get the kale from the sustainable farm to the local Whole Foods in their utopia of the future.

Tesla semi truck (photo credit Steve Jurvetson CC BY 2.0 license)

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