The Biden administration’s domestic energy policies, and geopolitical decisions, are likely causing energy inflation. This has a substantial impact on prices of goods and services across economic sectors.
By Kevin Mooney
In the approaching 2022 midterm elections, American voters will have the opportunity to decide whether oil industry executives are really to blame for high energy prices—or if it’s instead the political class that needs a shakeup.
In a new report for Real Clear Energy, Joseph Toomey, a career-management consultant, makes a persuasive case that the energy inflation now victimizing American consumers and taxpayers is the result of deliberate public-policy choices made here at home. Even as President Biden vilifies energy companies, the evidence is overwhelming that the current regime in Washington is beholden to climate extremism at the expense of affordable energy, Toomey argues.
As Toomey explains, Biden is poised to create a new industry of climate activists who will use the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a conduit for constraining private enterprise with the ostensible purpose of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions.
Meantime, the president’s EPA regulators are doubling down on biofuel blending mandates, collectively known as the Renewable Fuel Standard, a byproduct of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The onerous new rules impose retroactive compliance requirements over a two-year period. They’re just the latest of the Biden’s administration’s anti-energy initiatives. Recall that the president canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office and imposed a moratorium on oil and gas drilling on federal lands just a few days later. And Toomey documents a host of other choices that have put U.S. policy in the hands of “anti-energy zealots.”
Or consider two key Biden appointees: John Kerry, the administration’s climate envoy, and Gina McCarthy, top climate advisor, who served as EPA administrator under Barack Obama. Kerry has been a longtime proponent of the Paris Climate Accord, a U.N. agreement designed to put America last and China first. McCarthy, who recently left the White House, is a former president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a green group with close ties to China.
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Read the rest at RealClearEnergy.
Originally published by RealClearEnergy. Republished with permission.
Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter with both the Commonwealth Foundation and the Heritage Foundation.
