Thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s pea-brained energy policies, American families have spent more than $2,500 in higher energy prices since 2021.
Specifically, as detailed in a new policy analysis by The Heartland Institute, under the Biden-Harris administration, energy prices have soared across the board.
In fact, over the past three years, residential electricity prices have increased 23 percent, industrial electricity prices have increased 19 percent, home heating oil prices have increased 69 percent, oil prices have increased 52 percent, natural gas prices have increased 32 percent, and gasoline has increased $0.97 per gallon, or 42 percent.
These steep price increases for energy have taken quite a toll on hardworking Americans, who are also facing persistent inflation outside the energy sector.
To put these statistics in perspective, consider:
“After three years of Biden’s energy policies, the average U.S. driver has spent at least an extra $548 per year in higher gasoline costs while the average household has expended $318 in higher electricity costs.”
Moreover, “Households that use natural gas have spent an extra $586 over the past three years, and those using home heating oil have paid a whopping $3,068 more.”
Make no mistake, these figures only represent the direct cost to American households as a result of the Biden-Harris administration’s war on domestic energy production coupled with its renewable energy mandates.
It is nearly impossible to calculate how much the administration’s energy policies have affected the price of groceries and other goods and services. After all, grocery stores, and all businesses for that matter, are facing higher energy bills. And, the cost to transport goods has increased substantially due to higher prices for fuel.
Now that President Biden has announced he will not seek re-election, it seems more than likely that Vice President Kamala Harris will become the Democrat Party’s nominee for the upcoming 2024 election.
If this does indeed turn out to be the case, which is no guarantee by any means, what should we expect in terms of energy policy if Harris ascends to the top of the Democrat ticket?
In a nutshell, we should prepare for even higher energy prices because Kamala Harris is even more radical than President Biden when it comes to energy policy.
In 2020, during her brief run for the Democrat presidential nomination, Harris made it crystal clear that she is a climate alarmist to the core.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” then-Sen. Harris (D-CA) said at a town hall in late 2019.
During her run for the Democrat presidential nomination, Harris also endorsed a plan that included $10 trillion in new initiatives to fight climate change. What’s more, she supported a tax on carbon dioxide emissions as well as a national ban on plastic straws.
Even worse, Harris was an original co-sponsor of the radical Green New Deal, back when it was first proposed by the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). For those who have forgotten, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, described the Green New Deal as a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”
During her time as attorney general of California, Harris brought multiple lawsuits against oil companies and set her sights on Exxon-Mobil, arguing that the company deceived the public about climate change. What’s more, she is also a strong opponent of off shore oil drilling.
Aside from her antipathy towards fossil fuels, Harris is a firm supporter of renewable energy mandates, including the preposterous idea of making the entire U.S. economy “carbon neutral” in just a few decades. Of course, she supports electric vehicle mandates, gigantic government subsidies for wind and solar, and just about everything else having to do with so-called green energy.
Incredibly, were Kamala Harris to become the next president of the United States, her energy policy agenda would make former President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden look like relative moderates.
At a practical level, if the United States were to adopt even a portion of what Harris has proposed in recent years, it would result in a less reliable energy grid, even higher energy prices, and more financial hardship for hardworking Americans.
Harris’ misguided energy policies would also cripple the United States in the AI arms race because the AI revolution, along with quantum computing and other emerging technologies, will necessarily require giant amounts of abundant and affordable baseload energy.
In their present form, renewable energy sources simply cannot deliver enough constant energy flow to power the current U.S. economy, let alone the economy of the future.
Clearly, Kamala Harris, the frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination at this point, is a climate alarmist whose energy policies would be even worse for the nation than her current boss and possible predecessor.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
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