The Patriot Post® · The Energy Reduction Act

“With this law, the American people won and the special interests lost,” Joe Biden said of the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act as he signed it last Thursday. If you get your news outside the Leftmedia, you know the exact opposite is the truth, especially when it comes to energy policy. Biden may claim the law promotes an “all of the above” approach to energy, but the truth is, shall we say, more complicated.

The chief beneficiaries of your hard-earned tax dollars will be solar, wind, batteries, biofuels, hydrogen, carbon capture, and the like. It turns out that $370 billion will buy a lot of tax credits for Democrat special interests and Chinese communists, all at the expense of the American people and with virtually no change to global temperatures.

True, there are a few stipulations in the bill regarding expanded oil drilling, such as reinstating Lease Sale 257 to allow for more offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a very good thing. But the law also imposes a new tax of 16.4 cents per barrel on crude oil. That money will be taken directly from your credit card at that gas pump and transferred into the bank accounts of slave labor-using solar panel makers in China, courtesy of Joe Biden (and maybe Hunter for working a ChiCom deal via the Big Guy).

You might have noticed the price of gas is still astronomically higher than it was under Donald Trump, even if CNN wants you to think Biden’s given you a $100 raise with falling prices over the last month.

Other fossil fuels fare little better under Democrats’ law. Coal producers will be hit with double the excise tax, which will be passed on to anyone who uses electricity created by coal. (Here’s to you, smug Tesla driver.) There’s also a new methane fee, which could hit natural gas fracking and the same consumers of energy.

We’re certainly for an actual all-of-the-above energy policy, but one driven by innovation in the free market and American national security interests. Notably, the U.S. is awash in fossil fuel resources. Not so much when it comes to the raw materials needed for alternative energy sources, for which we’ll rely more heavily on foreign powers like China.

Democrat thumbs are heavily on the scales in favor of so-called renewable energy sources at the expense of traditional fossil fuels, which are greener than you think. When elites in Washington pick winners and losers, they almost never get it right and we all end up paying more and getting less.

Remember the infamous winter power outages in the oil-producing juggernaut of Texas? Lone Star State residents can thank an electrical grid that relies too heavily on unreliable renewable energy. Californians regularly endure power outages for the same reason. New York and Virginia want to follow their poor example.

Ah, well, never mind the trouble with windmills. Just buy solar panels. If you’re a person of what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm describes as “moderate income,” she says “you can get 30% off the price of solar panels,” which “can be financed.” If you’d rather buy an expensive electric car to save on gas, she touts the “$7,500 credit for those that are assembled in America.” She does not, however, mention that such credits benefit the manufacturer more than the consumer.

We mentioned China being a big beneficiary of the Democrats’ “green” agenda. That’s thanks largely to the control China has over the global supply of rare earths, which is a problem for several reasons. “Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors,” explains veteran investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield. “A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment.”

Ask the people of Myanmar how Chinese mining works out. Ask the people of South America if the Amazon rainforest can sustain Chinese demand for balsa wood to make wind turbines. And that’s to say nothing of all the EV batteries that will be produced using Chinese materials.

Obviously, it’s ironic that American greens can sleep well at night for having saved the planet even though their doing so comes thanks to the Chinese destroying the same planet. On top of that, these policies put the U.S. energy grid at the mercy of the communists in Beijing.

As Greenfield quips, “If astroturf environmental activists really wanted to save the planet, they would start chaining themselves to wind turbines, instead of vandalizing classical museum paintings.” Or, we might add, instead of ramming through Congress hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies for the very things causing significant environmental damage.

All energy production comes with tradeoffs. Democrats love to pretend this isn’t true and that only they can save the planet with a few magically perfect solar panels, windmills, and EVs. What they don’t tell you is just how expensive their policies will be for the environment, American consumers, and U.S. national security.