Midterm Election Day has passed. For the past several weeks, my phone was inundated with spam calls and text messages about the election. That was annoying, but more annoying was that my physical mailbox was stuffed daily with such quantities of flyers telling me how terrible one local candidate or another is. I am sure that they must have clear-cut several tree plantations just to send me mailers.
Among them was one sent out by a local Democrat-affiliated group decrying a Republican candidate for several things that I found extremely ironic. First, that they are a terrible no-good climate denier. Also, that Republicans caused the war in Iran, which led to high gasoline prices, and that this candidate is too friendly to data centers, which I am told are making electricity rates skyrocket (they aren’t).
Before tossing the mailer and all the rest of the junk into the trashcan, I marveled at the hypocrisy.
Just a few years ago, “degrowth” was a popular buzzword from leftist elites around the world. They loved the idea of making gasoline — and all petroleum products — more expensive in order to force people to use less of it. A massive push towards greater energy efficiency was foisted upon us over the past several decades in preparation for a supposedly climate-friendly world. At the same time, we were encouraged by mandate and social pressure to rely more heavily on electricity from the grid in the form of electric cars and appliances rather than those powered by gasoline and natural gas.
The idea was, we’re going to save the world from climate change by ending fossil fuels, and it would require us to give up our current standard of living, which was “unsustainable.”
So, I don’t really want to hear from Democrats that they are worried about fuel prices.
They were aware that their policies were raising electricity costs and the price of gasoline in even more extreme places like California, and that it would continue if they had their way at the national level. And for a while, after President Obama promised that electricity prices would rise under Democrat energy policy like cap-and-trade, they did!
Now, Democrats and some foolish Republicans are blaming data centers for recent electricity rate hikes, when the actual culprit is the snowballing impact of decades of awful climate-focused energy policy under both Republican and Democrat administrations, partly to the exclusion of Trump 2.0 (there is always room for improvement).
While data center energy demand has grown substantially in recent years, retail electricity prices are disconnected from that trend. It depends on the state, but by and large the states with the highest electricity cost increases are not necessarily also those with the greatest data center growth. The larger influence is whether the state has devoted itself to Net Zero, and whether it has a strict renewable portfolio standard mandating a phase-out of resources like coal.
This is another reason why it’s a terrible idea for Republicans to try to win over the climate-obsessed. If I were convinced that the world was hurtling towards apocalypse because of fossil fuel use and energy and the demand for material goods, there is no way I would vote for a “diet green” Republican, when I can vote for a Democrat who will deliver on sweeping change as best as they can. As they have incrementally for decades.
The best thing that ever came out of the otherwise very squishy conservative membership of the Congressional Climate Solutions Caucus was now-EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, much to my surprise and delight. He apparently dealt with the nonsense for long enough, and he recognizes what a sham it all is. Zeldin is doing a great job refusing to give any quarter to the green extremists. This EPA might be the sanest we’ve ever seen, though it takes a long time to unwind the nightmarish ball of yarn that is national environmental policy.
Democrat policies are what is driving local retail electricity rates up. The refusal to build reliable sources of energy that don’t lean on massive direct subsidies and mandates for decades is catching up with us, just in time for energy demand to jump due to emerging technology.
This isn’t to say Republican administrations have not messed up. Many at the state and federal level still feel this urge to play nice with environmentalist radicals, so long as they claim to be impartial scientists. It’s a mistake that will hinder any chance we have at lowering energy costs on the grid and in your vehicle.
Climate change is not an existential threat, but decarbonization and the consequences of deindustrialization may very well be.
Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. X: @LinneaLueken
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