Lines at gas stations are a feature, not a bug, of Biden's green future
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/lines-at-gas-stations-are-a-feature-not-a-bug-of-bidens-green-future
Every now and then, a reminder emerges of just how amazing America’s free market economic system really is — the very system that leftists ignorantly decry as “rigged,” “plutocratic,” and conducive to massive inequality.
But the system is unique, in truth, in having made the lives of ordinary people better than it has been at any time or in any place in human history. In the United States today, the average middle- to lower-income family enjoys a standard of living and an access to consumer choices and luxuries far beyond what kings and princes enjoyed even as recently as the 19th century.
Today’s Americans do not suffer lightly the sort of hardships that backward systems such as feudalism and socialism routinely produce — shortages, for example.
That is a gigantic problem for President Joe Biden’s White House.
Biden ran for president advocating, or at least paying lip service to, long-standing environmentalist plans designed to create gasoline shortages. They never put it that way, of course, but that has always been their goal in shutting down pipelines and banning new fracking and oil exploration. The whole point has been to stop fossil fuels from being extracted from the ground and burnt to run our economy, in the naive hope that this will cause global temperature patterns to change.
This plan, however, has just been preempted by a criminal plot to do much the same thing by other means. The DarkSide hacking group’s ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline put gasoline pipelines out of commission all up and down the East Coast. This has not only sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing but has actually caused gas stations on the Eastern Seaboard to run dry. This simply never happens under normal circumstances.
And — surprise, surprise — the public does not like it.
Electric cars comprise less than 2% of the national market for motor vehicles today. Gasoline and diesel are as much necessities for human life as they ever have been. This is especially true for those who work for a living and lack the wealth still required to invest in a new battery-powered automobile.
The Biden administration has been trying desperately to mollify angry drivers. The secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm, went so far as to admit in public that pipelines are the best, lowest-carbon means of moving petroleum products across the country. That admission is damning because one of Biden’s first acts in office was the unscientific and irrational scuttling of a long-needed extension to the Keystone pipeline system.
The green lobby needed its red meat, and it got it at the expense of ordinary members of the public. It did not matter to lobbyists that it even meant an increase in global greenhouse gases, as Canadian oil had to be shipped by rail and boat instead. If Biden’s administration understood this, as Granholm's admission shows that it did, then why did it cynically perform such demeaning, anti-science favors for its fanatical and ignorant left-wing backers?
Biden’s mugging reality illustrates the practical limits of pandering to environmental extremists. People who drive and work need affordable gasoline to function. No politician can afford to alienate all motorists at once. Biden put himself into this jam. The resulting discomfort couldn’t afflict a nicer guy.