Twenty million U.S. households — one out of every six — can’t afford to pay their energy bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. This latest financial struggle hits as Americans have already been walloped with runaway inflation, higher food prices, historically expensive commutes, and rocketing interest payments on revolving debt.
“Electricity prices have spiked due to the skyrocketing cost of natural gas. According to the Energy Information Administration, natural gas is the biggest source of electricity generation in the U.S.,” reports MoneyWise:
A year ago, natural gas traded at $4.31 per metric million British thermal unit. Today, it’s at $9.34 per MMBtu.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that July prices for electricity jumped 15.2% from a year ago, marking the biggest 12-month increase since 2006.
With natural gas prices up over 30% & electricity prices up over 15% since last July, 1 in 6 Americans are behind on utility bills and in danger of losing their utility services.
As Americans suffer, Biden continues to double down on the Green New Deal agenda that got us here.
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) September 6, 2022
It seems like the heady days of cheap, plentiful energy were a lifetime ago, instead of the less than two years since Democrats wrested the White House from President Trump and his pro-America, pro-efficiency policies. Leftists have a death grip on their dreams of green energy and are determined to drag us all down this path, no matter the consequences.
And there are consequences a-plenty. In August, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association told Bloomberg that this is the worst crisis they’ve ever documented. The outlet quoted Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, as saying, “I expect a tsunami of shutoffs.” The luckiest people will be those who heat their homes with oil or gas; if they can only afford to pay one utility bill, they may spend a lot of time in the dark eating cold food, but at least they won’t freeze. People who heat their homes with electricity and can’t afford the utility bill will be in dire straits.
Europe is expected to be even harder hit this winter. My colleague Chris Queen recently wrote:
Europe is beginning to reap the consequences of the green embrace, and it doesn’t look appealing. The combination of this enviro-religious fervor and the energy shortages that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought about has created dystopic conditions and dire predictions for Europeans.
Read the whole thing here: Europe Is Paying the Price for Embracing Environmentalism With Religious Fervor — and It’s a Lesson the U.S. Can Stand to Learn
CNN is reporting that Germany will drop a cool 2.5% of its entire GDP assisting citizens with heating bills, while England will spend $115 billion — nearly three times as much as it spent on its “pandemic furlough scheme, in which the government subsidized workers’ salaries to prevent mass layoffs.”
Google search volumes in Germany: "firewood" (blue) compared to "Greta Thunberg" (red) pic.twitter.com/waEuyUoS3y
— Stephen Taylor (@stephen_taylor) August 14, 2022
In December of 2021, “President” Joe Biden warned Americans who preferred not to obtain a novel injection would face a “winter of severe illness and death.” That turned out not to be the case at all, but a year later, far too many people are looking down the barrel of a cold, dark, miserable winter. But this time, it was completely preventable.
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