OPINION:
Gina McCarthy has a long career in and around the federal government.
She was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration. She was then chief executive officer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. She came back to the federal government for a return engagement during the first two years of Team Biden, where she ran pretty much all of the energy and environmental policy right out of the White House.
With a résumé like that, it should come as no surprise that she has done her best to impede the use of affordable, reliable domestic energy sources such as oil, coal and natural gas and make the United States dependent, to the very best of her ability, on more expensive and less reliable energy (like wind turbines and solar panels) that is sourced for the most part from slaving, genocidal communist China, or the child-labor-intensive Democratic Republic of Congo.
Her career culminated in the passage of what President Biden himself has called the “Inflation Act,” legislation that essentially transfers $400 billion from taxpayers to wealthy investors, many of whom are Democratic donors. We are certain that this is purely coincidental.
The good news is that the legislation closed the debate on whether wind and solar and batteries, and electric vehicles are cost-competitive with oil, natural gas and coal. Businesses built on legitimately cost-competitive technologies don’t need the federal government to take cash from taxpayers and give it to them.
Ms. McCarthy, as you might imagine, is not our cup of tea. Nevertheless, she is what has always been: a considerable and unapologetic warrior on the left side of the political spectrum.
It was with some surprise, therefore, that we learned recently that the Edison Electric Institute — the political association for the nation’s electric utilities — intends to present Ms. McCarthy with the Thomas A. Edison Legacy Award — its highest honor — at its January winter meeting (in Palm Beach, of course). That award is supposed to be for a lifetime of achievement that has advanced the electric industry in some important way.
It is not clear how using the coercive power of the state to make electricity more expensive and less reliable for all Americans can be considered an “achievement” under any conceivable definition of that word.
We get it. EEI is trying to make nice with its regulators in hopes that they will be lenient. But it is also true that EEI’s member companies stand to make bank on the Inflation Reduction Act. Giving an award to a Team Biden operative as a thank-you for that new flow of cash is craven and more than a little corrupt.
EEI should be ashamed of itself and should withdraw the award. But we’re betting they’re not, and they won’t.
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