Budget Reconciliation Bill May Break Our Energy Budgets

October 5, 2021

Last week, PTF noted that Europe’s disastrous energy policies have created skyrocketing energy prices around the globe, precisely when people in the northern hemisphere will need reliable and affordable energy to get through the winter.  Making the situation worse, European countries have been steadily taking energy options off the table.

Writing in Forbes, energy analyst David Blackmon reports that the dramatic increase in natural gas prices would normally lead energy companies in Europe to switch to fuel oil for power generation – but unfortunately, this fuel-switching has been banned as a result of pressures from the green lobby. Blackmon notes:

That is of course just one more example of the kinds of premature and frankly irrational energy choices governments – including the U.S. – have been making in the past few years to try to hasten this “energy transition,” forcing the replacement of reliable, high-density energy sources like fossil fuels and nuclear with low-density energy sources like wind, solar and electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries.

The dangers of these policies are obvious, but it’s a reality that eco-politicians in Washington are eager to ignore, instead pushing their Green New Deal policies. This is what is at stake in the current debate over the budget reconciliation bill, as Blackmon writes:

It is in the face of this looming energy crisis in Europe largely precipitated by these policy decisions that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have spent the past week attempting to move their “budget reconciliation” bill, which is mainly a social welfare and Green New Deal funding bill. This massive piece of legislation is loaded up with hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies, mandates and incentives for these very same intermittent, low-density energy sources, along with new taxes and draconian regulatory actions designed to drive up the cost of fossil fuels in power generation and transportation.

Indeed, the fact that energy gets more expensive as a result of these Green New Deal policies isn’t a byproduct of these policies; it is the point of these policies. Radical environmentalists want to make energy more expensive so their preferred and less reliable sources of electricity can finally compete in the marketplace. They want to pick the ‘energy winners,’ and in the process make us all ‘energy losers’.