The Anti-Energy President vs. the Poor

“The policy of the Obama administration has been not to increase the energy supplies that are so critical to our nation’s economic health, but to limit them, to increase energy prices, and to make energy more expensive,” Pete DuPont writes today in The Wall Street Journal.

DuPont lists several examples of this policy at work, none of which is new to Locker Room readers: Obama’s desire to “bankrupt coal companies,” his opposition to the Keystone oil pipeline, his excessive — and expensive — overregulation (DuPont counts 106 new major regulations costing $46 billion), and his obsessive zeal to try to force “green” energy to work despite all market signals pointing to their being complete wastes of money.

Not only is this policy wrongheaded, but given the circumstances — this policy is at work during what perpetually befuddled media are terming “the Great Recession” — it is perverse. The current administration has a specific policy of forcing much higher electricity prices on consumers during a prolonged recession. As I point out in my Rights & Regulations newsletter this week, Obama’s policy is a sea change in Democratic presidential attitudes toward the importance of affordable electricity.

What the president is doing is a complete abdication of any possible claim to “compassion for the poor.” He is governing for his Green Energy cronies exactly as the worst exaggerations the Left could devise for his predecessor’s relationship with Big Oil. The only reason the Establishment Media aren’t exposing this is entrenched ideology, that kind that the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned us about, the kind that helps the true believers to ignore the humanity crushed underneath.