Harsanyi: Elites' Solution to Soaring Gas Prices Is Disgustingly Out of Touch
“Well, you all imagined it,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a so-called “clean transit” event where she appeared with fellow tautologist Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “That’s why we’re here today — because we have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.”
When Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete get together, it’s Platitudicon. This week, as the reality of a historic spike in gas prices was hitting Americans, the duo spent the day promoting electric cars, the Green New Deal and the Environmental Protection Agency’s soon-to-be-tightened emissions standards.
When it comes to energy, Democrats adopt a bizarre elitist disconnect: Propelled by an almost religious end-of-days climate alarmism, they assume that Americans will join them in losing all sense of perspective.
Despite their perpetual championing of electric vehicles, less than 1 percent of cars, SUVs and light trucks on the road in the U.S. are electric. The average cost of an electric car is $55,000, around $19,000 higher than the price of an average gas-powered vehicle. The average Tesla goes for around $75,000. Leasing the Model S, not at the high end of the Tesla line, is still likely to cost you more than $600 per month.
Not everyone is pulling in Ocasio-Cortez bucks.
Even if they are, they’re probably more concerned with functionality than pricey virtue-signaling. Why would a couple with kids shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that is easy to drive any distance and in any environment and, until recently, could be cheaply fueled?
Fossil fuels are the most efficient, affordable, portable and useful form of energy. And we have a vast supply of them. In recent years, the U.S. has become the world’s largest oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore fossil fuels here at home — and many more around the world. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground. Four dollars a gallon is a choice.
Every plan to fight climate change creates either fabricated markets or artificial scarcity.
President Joe Biden wants half of the new cars produced in the U.S. to be electric by 2030 (the year we will miraculously reach zero emissions), not because consumers demand EVs but because technocrats decided to manipulate the market and coerce Americans into driving them. Ford and GM promise to dramatically scale back gas-powered cars and become electric car manufacturers by 2035. Car companies know they’re too big to fail.
And in the meantime, let them eat cake.
“Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4 a gallon,” Stephen Colbert ($15 million yearly salary) joked on Monday. “OK, that stings, but a clean conscience is worth a buck or two. It’s important. I’m willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.”
If sending envoys to Iran and Venezuela to beg for oil soothes your conscience, so be it. But Colbert’s comment is almost as funny as Buttigieg telling Americans that families who own an electric vehicle will “never have to worry about gas prices again.”
Where do Buttigieg and Colbert believe the power used to charge those electric cars comes from? Over 70 percent is from oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy. Nuclear, in fact, is a cheaper and more practical alternative to revamping an entire $22 trillion economy than the high-minded proposals meant to cleanse the consciences of climate scaremongers.
Meanwhile, the same officials who argue that increasing domestic capacity and allowing more North American imports would have no immediate impact on gas prices suggest that you buy yourself an expensive, impractical luxury item.
The difference between them and Marie Antoinette is that the latter never actually said “Let them eat cake.”
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