It gives us no pleasure to say it, but de Maistre was right: We Americans are getting the government we deserve.

Mencken, too, was right when he said we deserved to get it “good and hard.”

We’re getting it good and hard all right, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of energy, where Joe Biden continues to make all the wrong moves. This time, it involves a cockamamie process called carbon capture. As The New York Times reports:

President Biden’s administration is poised to announce limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that could compel them to capture the pollution from their smokestacks, technology now used by fewer than 10 of the nation’s 3,400 coal and gas-fired plants, according to three people who were briefed on the rule.

If implemented, the proposed regulation would be the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, which generate about 25 percent of the planet-warming pollution produced by the United States. It would also apply to future plants.

Why, you ask, are fewer than 10 of our nation’s 3,400 fossil-fuel power plants using this technology? Answer: because it’s ungodly expensive. And guess who’ll be on the hook for that added expense? Yep, you.

Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer by trade, does a lot of number crunching to determine that, if implemented, Scranton Joe’s latest “green energy” regulations “would increase the overall cost of electricity in the United States by at least 50 percent, with that portion of the bill being sent to the taxpayers.”

At least fifty percent. If kilowatt hours are your thing, knock yourself out. Like a good mathematician, Zubrin shows his work.

All of this is compliments of Biden’s diabolically laughably named Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $135 in tax credits (read: taxpayer credits) to utility companies for every ton of CO₂ they capture. If we assume no growth in U.S. electric production — which, let’s face it, seems overly optimistic — the total taxpayer bill for these carbon-capture credits would be around $246 billion per year.

But wait: That’s just the taxpayer subsidy. And the subsidy won’t fully cover the cost incurred by these utility companies. “If it were,” Zubrin notes, “utility companies would be rushing to take the [Inflation Reduction Act] subsidy and implement carbon capture technology now, without any new EPA regulations forcing them to do so.”

Zubrin continues: “Between the tax subsidy and rate increases, the Biden initiative could multiply the cost of American electricity as much as fourfold. This would represent a massive, highly regressive tax not only of the American public, but also upon U.S. industry, accelerating the deindustrialization of America, costing millions of jobs, and critically weakening our defense-industrial base.”

Have a nice day.

It’s indeed a fine mess those, ahem, 81 million Biden voters have gotten us into, but there is a way out: nuclear energy.

As our Nate Jackson noted last week, we Americans get 60% of our electricity from the aforementioned coal- and gas-fired power plants. The idea that we could, at any time in the foreseeable future, replace three-fifths of our energy supply with the Left’s twin fantasies of wind and solar is lunacy. But with nuclear, it’s entirely doable — if only we can summon up the collective will.

“Democratic administrations from FDR though LBJ,” notes Zubrin, “had a leading role in creating and expanding nuclear energy. But since the 1970s, the Democratic Party policy has been to try to kill it through hyperregulation and obstruction on every front. In the ‘50s and '60s, they supported nuclear power because it reduces air pollution.”

Since then, of course, the Left has targeted the nuclear industry for destruction, filling gullible folks’ minds with thoughts of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl instead of the other-worldly energy density of nuclear and its carbon-free footprint. Thus, the Democrats have all but forbidden the building of any modern nuclear plants for the past half-century.

And Joe Biden has been there to witness it all.

If the Democrats really do believe, as Zubrin argues, that carbon emissions pose an “existential threat” to humanity, then their resistance to nuclear power is even more unforgivable.