OPINION:
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The Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars on green energy, yet last year, the U.S. and the world used a record amount of fossil fuels.
That would seem to be prima facie evidence that this “great transition” to renewable energy has so far been an expensive policy belly flop.
The evidence is everywhere.
Americans aren’t buying electric vehicles any more than they were before President Biden was elected. Even with record federal subsidies, the car companies are losing billions of dollars making EVs that people don’t want. Wind and solar still account for less than 10% of American energy. Across the country, hundreds of communities are saying “not in my backyard” to large, ugly solar and wind farms. And of course, gasoline prices and electric bills are 30% to 50% higher, even though we were promised that the green revolution would save us money.
A case in point is the scandalous mismanagement of how these green energy programs are being implemented. Consider the $7.5 billion federal program stuck inside the Biden 2021 Infrastructure bill, a law that Mr. Biden cites as one of his great achievements. That bill promised half a million EV charging stations installed nationwide.
Instead, there have been a grand total of … drumroll, please … “seven or eight installed.” To be fair, that was through last month. They might be up to nine now.
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was confronted recently on CBS’ “Face the Nation” regarding what happened with all the money, he hemmed and hawed and replied: “In order to do a charger, it’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground. There’s utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment.”
Uh-huh. Sure. Installing an electric charger for a Tesla in your garage is complicated. It’s like building the Taj Mahal (which may not have cost $7.5 billion).
Here’s another mystery. Why can’t Pete accurately count the progress when the number is small enough to use his fingers? What is for sure is that at this pace, 500 might get built by 2030 — not the 500,000 promised.
Thank God our celebrated transportation secretary, renowned for riding his bicycle to his office in Washington, wasn’t in charge of the Normandy landing.
Then there is the question of where the $7.5 billion of taxpayer money has actually gone. At their current production rate, the program’s cost could inflate to more than $1 trillion.
If Donald Trump were president, he’d have long ago summoned “Mayor Pete” to the Oval Office and greeted him with those two words that made him famous: “You’re fired.”
Instead, many Democrats are quietly talking about dropping Mr. Biden from the ticket, and one of the front-runners to take his place is the highly accomplished Pete Buttigieg.
But there are some serious lessons to be learned from this monumental screw-up.
First, though Mr. Biden loves to chat about how much money the government is “investing,” where are the signs that any of these trillions of dollars of borrowed money have improved our lives? This EV charger scandal is just another reminder that the government generally doesn’t “invest” tax dollars — it mostly wastes them.
Second, competence matters. At the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, we released a study finding that more than 90% of Mr. Biden’s top economic and finance team has no experience running a business. We have an energy secretary who knows nothing about energy and a transportation secretary who knows nothing about transportation. They are either lawyers, academics, politicians or government employees.
They are not bad people. They just don’t know how to run anything — and it shows.
Finally, why do we need the government to build EV charging stations? A hundred years ago, the government didn’t build gas stations. They just sprouted up along the roads that crisscross America because entrepreneurs responded to the demand. So, two or three brothers would scrap together some cash, buy a small plot of land along Route 66, build a service station with four to eight hoses connected to a tank, and put up a tall sign posting the gas price. And then, drivers would pull in for a fill-up.
All of this “infrastructure” was created without a single penny or instruction manual from Washington.
Can you imagine if Mr. Biden had been president in the 1920s and proclaimed that the government would build 500,000 filling stations? They still wouldn’t be built, and we’d all be waiting in long gas lines.
• Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
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