OPINION:
Ruling like the dictator he says former President Donald Trump aspires to be, President Biden has decreed restrictions, if not prohibitions, on natural gas-powered stoves, gas furnaces, gasoline-powered cars and trucks, and other products. Congress has passed no such laws for Mr. Biden to sign. Instead, he has acted unilaterally, as despots do.
Emperor Biden further expects Americans to replace these fossil-fueled mechanisms with their electric counterparts.
But what will propel these items as they draw electricity from America’s already fragile grid?
The Biden administration has not gotten that far. To the contrary, it is hammering major sources of voltage, even while trying to coerce into existence the Electric States of America.
What Mr. Biden’s approach boasts in authoritarianism, it lacks in coherence.
Mr. Biden’s climate guru, John Kerry, attended the just-concluded U.N. climate change hoedown in Dubai. Some of its 80,000 participants got delayed en route, as their private jets bogged down as 17 inches of snow closed Munich’s airport.
Mr. Kerry soldiered forth and declared, “There shouldn’t be any more coal power plants permitted anywhere in the world.”
He added, “I do not understand how adults who are in a position of responsibility can be avoiding responsibility for taking away those things that are killing people on a daily basis.”
When coal took a break from its homicides du jour, it also yielded 19.7% of U.S. electricity in 2022, according to Mr. Biden’s own Energy Information Administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled edicts on Dec. 2 that would clamp down on methane emissions from oil and gas wells. Methane and natural gas are essentially interchangeable. So this bid to reduce 58 million tons of methane through 2038 is a barely disguised billy club to beat down the natural gas industry.
Never mind that last year, 39.9% of U.S. electricity came from natural gas. My Fox News colleague Liz Peek reports that these new regulations could padlock “8% to 10% of natural gas production.” She also mocked the climate change conference as “the Super Bowl of virtue signaling.”
Mr. Biden’s Council on Environmental Quality is holding secret discussions with fish-loving activists in Washington state. They hope to tear down four dams on the Snake River to satisfy local salmon. These green radicals seem little interested in the 100% carbon-free power that these dams produce, nor encouraged that 6% of America’s power was hydroelectric in 2022.
So, among coal, natural gas and hydroelectric, Mr. Biden has put bull’s-eyes on the sources of 65.6% of U.S. electricity.
“Don’t worry,” the president and his fellow climatarians reply. “Solar and wind power will save us.”
Inconvenient truth: Solar power generated just 3.4% of U.S. energy, and wind 10.3%. Thus, these two sources of electricity, totaling 13.7%, would have to grow by 479% — damn near fivefold — to replace coal, natural gas and hydroelectric, which Mr. Biden finds somewhere between distasteful and morally repugnant.
Even worse, solar power wanes when the sun goes down early in the fall and winter. And year-round, solar power stops after sunset.
Offshore wind projects from New Jersey to Connecticut to Massachusetts have been canceled, in part because they seem to drive whales, dolphins and other marine mammals fatally onto beaches.
Even if one swallows Mr. Biden’s outlandish blather that the alleged climate crisis is “even more frightening than a nuclear war,” only a belief in energy-producing leprechauns could explain relentless decrees to plug everything into America’s walls while slashing the power flowing into America’s sockets.
While Mr. Biden oscillates between eco-fantasy and enviro-tyranny, U.N. Climate Change Conference President Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates operates in reality. He warned the warmists that fleeing fossil fuels before renewables are viable will “take the world back into caves.” If Mr. Biden’s command economy for energy prevails, Americans will watch candles flicker beside blackened HDTVs.
Left uncorrected, Mr. Biden’s staggering ignorance of supply and demand will generate consequences that recall Pat Travers’ rock classic “Boom Boom: Out Go the Lights.”
• Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.