By John F. Di Leo -
On Tuesday, August 10, AD 2021, the U.S. Senate passed an “infrastructure” bill, of which less than half was actually infrastructure, and which contains a siphon clause that enables the administration to largely disregard the law entirely and spend the money on whatever it wants to. It is less a spending bill than a blank check bill.
But the part of this operation that may need the most comment is the aspect that furthers the so-called Green New Deal, both in this bill and a follow-up spending bill, also inaccurately being passed off as an infrastructure bill.
The issue at hand is energy, as political a commodity as there has ever been.
In the United States, we often discuss the concept that “Energy Equals Freedom.”
On the surface, that equation means that our independence as huge producers of petroleum and natural gas enables the United States to be free of the bullies of OPEC throwing their weight around.
But there is another, even more important aspect to the equation “Energy Equals Freedom,” more often forgotten, but incredibly important:
Virtually unlimited and affordable energy is what enables Americans to live anywhere we want and to do anything we want… even to go anywhere we want, as far from home as we want, across this great country.
Let’s think about what that means.
While energy is available, we can live in the cold North and afford to heat our homes… or we can live in the hot South and afford air conditioning. We can even live in the erratic Midwest, where we go from furnace to air-conditioning, back and forth, often in the same day, for half the year…
And plentiful energy affects more than just where we live and work.
As long as we drive cars that run on gasoline, we can take the family on vacations. We can work as traveling salesmen. We can spend our youth as roadies for a band or traveling show; we can spend our retirement touring the nation in an RV. Do we want a vacation? There is nothing to stop us from gassing up the car, heading for a coast or a national border, and going 1000 miles away for a week.
We can live at one end of a huge metro area like Chicago or Dallas, and take a job at the other end of the metro, or even in a different city entirely, an hour away. In a family of six, all four kids can go to colleges at all four corners of the country if they want to.
Our factories can manufacture anything from paper to plastics, from wood to steel. Mass production requires energy, charging our cellphones requires energy. Lighting our homes, businesses and highways requires energy.
And, fortunately for us, as long as we have the selection of petroleum and natural gas, nuclear and hydro, the United States have virtually unlimited energy.
This is imperative to our way of life. We have a mobile society, and energy is a crucial part of that mobility.
Now, into the midst of this energy-dependent culture, the environmentalist/extremist Left has appeared, with an utterly malevolent campaign against the use of petroleum and natural gas, and a claim that solar and wind could replace the petroleum and natural gas energy we use today. Everyone who takes even a cursory glance at the math knows it’s impossible. Because of both production and the storage and transportation challenges inherent in wind and solar power, they can never produce enough power to be anything but a small supplement to America’s energy needs.
Many of us therefore, naturally, scornfully deride the Left’s effort to eliminate the gasoline/powered car entirely and replace it with electric cars. We laughingly point out that there just isn’t enough electricity on the grid to power all those vehicles, and the vast majority of such vehicles can’t go far enough on a single charge to be of any value for most American needs.
But when we take this position, we fail to realize the true malevolence of the environmentalist Left’s effort.
In point of fact… the Left DOES know all this. Yes, they do.
And it’s not that the Left doesn’t care… It’s worse, much worse: This is their very goal. They WANT the energy grid to be insufficient. They want shortages.
The simple fact is, the Left doesn’t want us to travel so much. They don’t want us to have this mobility that we have taken for granted for so long.
The Left doesn’t want your children to have the freedom to go to whatever college they choose. They don’t want you to choose which jobs to apply for, at what company, and in whatever part of the country you want to live.
The Left believes in control.
When you are free to utilize America’s plentiful petroleum and natural gas, you have the power to decide where you live, where you work, and what you do.
When there are electricity shortages, the government has the power to decide who gets electricity and who doesn’t. The government can ration it.
Ask a Chicago old-timer what it used to be like to be a Republican in Chicago, or to be a Democrat who supported “the wrong candidate” in the last aldermanic race. They didn’t get their street plowed. They didn’t get their garbage picked up. The next property tax assessment resulted in a big tax increase.
Imagine all that and worse, writ large, in a nation short on energy.
If the government can ration an insufficient amount of energy, then the government has the power to decide everything about your life.
Now, do you understand the real purpose behind the environmental movement, and the Green New Deal?
Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland based international trade compliance trainer, transportation manager, writer and actor. His columns have been found in Illinois Review since 2009.
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