It’s every juvenile climate hysteric’s wet dream: gas prices are going through the roof. This means less gas will be sold, fewer miles will be driven, and fewer greenhouse gases will be emitted.
This is a feature, not a bug of climate change advocacy. It is the desired result of raising the cost of keeping your SUV running.
The climate hysterics want you to feel pain. They want you to drain your wallet. They want you to get angry — preferably at the oil companies, which is exactly what Democrats in Congress have been making a show of doing for the last few weeks. They’ve been holding hearings on why gas is so expensive. They’ve hauled oil company executives into their committee hearings and berated them for price-gouging and profiteering.
But it’s all a sham. Democrats are jubilant that everything they’ve been hoping for as far as high fuel costs is coming to pass. In less than a year and a half, gas prices have nearly doubled, with the promise of much more to come.
Just in time to save the planet.
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
The liberal Center for American Progress suggests:
The most effective approach is to provide financial relief to consumers who are experiencing an erosion of real income and purchasing power from high energy costs amid overall increases in the cost of living and stagnant wage gains. There are many ways to provide this relief. One is a program of income tax credits for middle- and low-income consumers, which would increase their disposable income by $500 to $1,000 a year.
In lieu of (or in addition to) these tax credits, Congress could provide a “fuel price reliefbate” of up to $450, with low-income consumers receiving the largest benefits. This mechanism, proposed last week by my CAP colleagues, could be funded through a repeal of oil industry tax breaks or a windfall-profits tax on the industry.
Sending more stimulus and “reliefbate” checks to people using money that doesn’t exist and won’t exist for 100 years is not an option for any rational, responsible lawmaker — which puts the plan right up most Democrats’ alley.
Related: Elitist Leftists Play Games With Energy
“You can’t fool all the people all the time,” said Abe Lincoln. But Democrats are hoping to change that calculus by charging oil companies with being too successful and getting too rich, in an attempt to distract the public.
If people fall for it, they have only themselves to blame when their car becomes too expensive to drive — the deliberate result of policies initiated by Democrats in order to “save the planet” from an unproven hypothetical threat.
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