Heating Is the Coming Crisis, Brought on by Green Stupidity
Robert Bradley
Founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research
Principal, MasterResource: A Free-Market Energy Blog….
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[Editor’s Note: The heating crisis is already here and will quickly get much worse as temperatures drop. It is Western energy policy, stupidity really, that’s bringing it on.]
David Blackmon recently promoted Tucker Carlson’s post-Thanksgiving day monologue on energy with the admonition: “It should be required viewing or reading for every American citizen.” Correct.
Watch the latest video at foxnews.com
Carlson’s monologue is reprinted below, followed by a short segment on Fox Business:
Now that we are [back from Thanksgiving], an obvious observation: All prosperity in this country depends ultimately on energy. Our consumer economy runs on it.
It takes energy to make things and bring them to your house. Our tech economy runs on energy too, a lot of it. How do you think they keep their server farms running? Energy is pretty much, in fact, the key to everything that Americans do for a living. It’s the key to health care and agriculture and yes, media and travel and construction, entertainment—even finance, which is symbiotic with the real economy, depends in the end on energy, because you can’t lend money to businesses if they no longer exist and if energy prices go up high enough, they don’t exist.
Given how central, very obviously central, energy is to everything that matters in America, it’s hard to believe that the Biden administration would intentionally make energy much more expensive, because we know for a fact, having seen it repeatedly through history, that high energy prices will crush our economy faster even than the COVID lockdowns did.
People will become poor. Some of them will die. That’s not a guess. It will happen. Given all that, it’s unimaginable that anyone but our enemies would want to raise our energy prices to the point where our economy collapses and yet that is exactly what the Biden administration has decided to do and to do it, they’re using twin instruments of climate policy and their war against Russia.
The effect? In a nation with the largest recoverable oil reserves on planet Earth, many Americans can no longer afford fossil fuels and once again, this is not an accident. It’s not a natural cycle we’re going through. Politicians and policymakers are doing it to us on purpose. Now that the midterm elections are over, the media can finally begin to cover the inevitable result of these policies. CNN, for example, just ran an article about Americans who are worried about freezing to death over the winter in America.
One 63-year-old woman in Philadelphia called Charmaine Johnson said that she is torn between heating her home and buying food and of course, she’s choosing food because she has no choice. “It’s miserable,” she said. “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Another man, a 67-year-old man called Tim Wiseley said he turns on his heat only when his teeth begin to chatter. “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other,” he said. “It’s a horrible feeling. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t wish on anyone.” It’s a feeling that Americans have not had in generations.
These are American citizens living in a major American city that used to be considered first world and they can’t afford heat and it’s happening not just in Philadelphia, but everywhere. Average home heating prices went up 17% last year and they’re up another 18% this year. Again, not organic.
This is the result of policies from the Biden administration and its allies, not just in the Congress, but in think tanks across Washington and in the entire American news media. This did not happen by accident. As FOX Business has reported, once winter arrives, the problem is going to get much worse.
And from Fox Business:
FOX: Across the board, heating costs are expected to be high this winter. Heating oil in particular, up 68% year over year. Today, they filled up this tank with about $950 worth of home heating oil. A year ago, the same amount of oil would have cost them closer to $600. That’s why the company tells me that some customers are just doing without.
MAN: People have gone without hot water and heat for a week just because they haven’t had the money to call me and say, “Hey, come on in.”
They don’t have the money for hot water or heat. Again, what country is this? Any country that can’t provide hot water or heat in the winter isn’t much of a country and again, it doesn’t need to be this way because we have the largest recoverable oil reserves on the planet. What happens when energy costs continue to rise?
Well, people run out of money and it doesn’t take long. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, households are spending their cash reserves far faster than anyone all those economists projected, even as credit card debt reaches historic levels.
If you’re borrowing money for household expenses on your credit card at exorbitant rates, you’re done. As Business Insider reported, “Americans have already burned through a third of their pent up savings. That’s nearly three times more than previously thought and signals spending will soon slow down.”
Yeah, that’s what happens when people run out of money. They stop spending it because they don’t have it and then the consumer economy slows. When energy costs rise again (Just to be clear, because it’s not sophisticated economics here) when they rise, so does the price of everything else. The first staple to rise in cost is the one that you have to have and that’s food….
Reposted, with permission, from the Master Resource website.
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