Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/