Voters Aren’t Thankful for Higher Energy Costs

To judge from the tone of the left-leaning opinion journals breathlessly promoting a report indicating that residential electricity costs will increase by an average of 8 percent over the coming summer, they believe this is a good problem for Democrats to have.

The analysis produced by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association and the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate determined that it will cost $719 to cool the average American home this summer, an increase of $58 from just last year. The situation is worse for Americans on the coasts, where electricity prices could spike up to 12 percent from one year ago.

How does this help Democrats, you wonder? Well, given that the spike is, according to the organization, wholly attributable to climate change and only one party is seriously committed to reducing global heat-trapping emissions levels, where else are cash-strapped voters going to turn? In addition, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act contains a conspicuous amount of spending on environmental programs designed to ease the burden on electricity consumers. And relief is on the way. “Clean energy deployment from both the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is projected to cut electricity rates by as much as 9 percent,” Joe Biden’s White House patiently explained, “by 2030.”

But as electricity consumers probably already know, this year’s price spike only compounds the increase in the cost of power over the course of Biden’s presidency — a 27 percent increase since Biden took office. The price spike is driven by a variety of factors, but the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations substituting conventional on-demand power-generation methods with inefficient and expensive green energy alternatives isn’t the least of them.

This wasn’t an unforeseen outcome. “The Biden Administration has so far been adding regulatory costs at a rate of $617 billion per year of rulemaking, not counting regulatory costs created by statutes and other non-rule regulatory actions,” University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan said in testimony before the Congressional Oversight Committee last year. “One finding is that the rules finalized by the Biden Administration through the end of 2022 impose costs of nearly $10,000 per household, which is $1,300 more than the burden of the Obama Administration rules during the comparable timeframe.”

Truncating electricity supplies and increasing the operating costs of electricity producers amid growing demand is a recipe for higher consumer costs. Editors and journalists at venues like Mother Jones and the Guardian appear to believe that voters will respond to this new hardship by giving Democrats even more authority to exacerbate the privation over which they presided. Hardly a sound bet.