Ruling like the dictator whom he says Donald J. Trump aspires to be, President Joe Biden has decreed restrictions, if not prohibitions, on gas stoves, gas furnaces, gasoline-powered cars and trucks, and other products. Congress has passed no such laws for Biden to sign. Instead, he has acted unilaterally, as despots do.
Emperor Biden further expects Americans to replace these fossil-fueled mechanisms with electric counterparts.
But what will propel these items as they draw electricity from America’s already fragile grid?
Team Biden has not gotten that far. To the contrary, they are hammering major sources of voltage, even while trying to coerce into existence the Electric States of America.
What Biden’s approach boasts in authoritarianism, it lacks in coherence.
Biden’s “Climate!” guru, John Kerry, attended the just-concluded COP28 global-warming hoe-down in Dubai. Some of its 80,000 participants got delayed en route, as their private jets bogged down, and 17 inches of snow closed Munich’s airport.
Kerry soldiered forth and soon declared that “There shouldn’t be any more coal power plants permitted anywhere in the world.” He added: “I do not understand how adults who are in a position of responsibility can be avoiding responsibility for taking away those things that are killing people on a daily basis.”
When coal took a break from its homicides du jour, it also yielded 19.7% of U.S. electricity in 2022, according to Biden’s own Energy Information Administration.
Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency unveiled edicts on December 2 that would clamp down on methane emissions from new and existing oil and gas wells. Methane and natural gas are essentially interchangeable. So, this bid to reduce 58 million tons of methane through 2038 is a barely disguised billy club to beat down the natural gas industry.
Never mind that, last year, 39.9% of US electricity came from natural gas. My Fox News colleague Liz Peek reports that these new regulations could padlock “8% to 10% of natural gas production.” She also mocked COP28 as “the Super Bowl of virtue signaling.”
Biden’s Council on Environmental Quality is holding secret discussions with fish-loving activists in Washington State. They hope to tear down four dams on the Snake River, to satisfy local salmon. These Green radicals seem little interested in the 100% carbon-free power that these dams produce, nor encouraged that 6.0% of America’s kilowatts were hydroelectric in 2022.
So, among coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric, Biden has put bullseyes on the sources of 65.6% of US electricity.
“Don’t worry!” Biden and his fellow Climatarians reply. “Solar and wind power will save us!”
Inconvenient truth: Solar power generated just 3.4% of U.S. energy, and wind 10.3%. Thus, these two sources of electricity, totaling 13.7%, would have to grow by 479% — damn-near fivefold — to replace coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric, which Emperor Biden finds somewhere between distasteful and morally repugnant.
Even worse, solar power wanes when the Sun goes home early in the fall and winter. And year-round, solar power stops after sunset.
Offshore wind projects from New Jersey to Connecticut to Massachusetts have been cancelled, in part because they seem to drive whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals fatally onto beaches.
Even if one swallows Biden’s outlandish blather that the alleged “climate crisis” is “even more frightening than a nuclear war,” only a belief in energy-producing leprechauns could explain relentless decrees to plug everything into America’s walls while slashing the power flowing into America’s sockets.
While Joe Biden oscillates between eco-fantasy and enviro-tyranny, COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates operates in reality. He warned the warmists that fleeing fossil fuels before renewables are viable will “take the world back into caves.” If Biden’s command economy for energy prevails, Americans will watch candles flicker beside blackened HDTVs.
Left uncorrected, Joe Biden’s staggering ignorance of supply and demand will generate consequences that recall Pat Travers’ rock and roll classic.
“Boom Boom: Out Go the Lights.”
Deroy Murdock on December 18, 2023
