Biden Keeps Promising To Destroy Domestic Energy Production. Believe Him.

Yes, we’re going to make energy more expensive.

That’s Joe Biden’s closing message for 2022. “We’re going to be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar,” Biden told a crowd in deep blue California on Friday, arguing that it was “cheaper” to generate electricity from wind and solar.

Is it? In California, which not only leads the nation in “clean energy” production but is leading the rest of us into rolling blackouts, residents pay 24.62 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy, around double the national average. There are only three other states where residents fork 20 or more cents over, the isolated Hawaii and Alaska and the frack-banning New York. The price of a gallon of gas in California is around two dollars over the national average, at $5.458. In Texas, it’s $3.173.

The president also forgot to mention that affordable natural gas, propelled by technological efficiencies like fracking, is as much a reason for the struggles of coal. And — after West Virginia’s Joe Manchin groused about Biden’s denigration of his state’s top industry — White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the media noted, “walked back” the comments, contending that the president’s “remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense.”

How they were distorted, she did not say. The statement stresses that the president understands that “the men and women of coal country built this nation” but that, yes, we must shut down the coal industry — as well as the oil and gas production. Biden is sorry that you’re offended. “Our goal as a nation is to combat climate change and increase our energy security by producing clean and efficient American energy,” the statement falsely goes on to say. Wind and solar, both victims to vagaries of the weather, aren’t, by any definition, “efficient.”

The kerfuffle, as with most debates over gas and oil, is confusing. The administration’s stated goal — one of the major policy planks of the Democratic Party — is to deliberately, through mandates or bans or taxes or contrived “markets,” make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to force a “transition.” Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice promises that a 100 percent clean energy economy and net-zero emissions will exist no later than 2050. California has banned new gas-powered cars by 2035. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, supported by virtually every Democratic Party presidential candidate last time around, is far more extreme.

In case there was any confusion, however, Biden reiterated his position at a rally for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul later this past weekend. Responding to a climate activist heckler, Biden shouted: “No more drilling. There is no more drilling! I haven’t formed any new drilling.” It’s one of the few true things the president has said in a while. The Biden administration, even during historic spikes in gas prices, effectively shut down any new federal leases. Sure, the administration pressured