OPINION:
Whenever a product is marketed as being “for the environment,” you can expect to pay a hefty premium. That’s one of the many reasons budget-conscious shoppers have turned up their noses at the prospect of trading their gas-powered automobiles for one of the pricey electric vehicles that have become a status symbol among those desperate to be seen as green.
The administration’s latest scheme hopes to force the public to go electric by jacking up the price of gasoline, making EVs look like slightly less of a bad deal.
Last week, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Russia extended their current 1.3 million barrels a day oil-production reductions to lessen supplies and raise prices. The following day, President Biden joined the energy squeeze by canceling oil and natural gas drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and prohibiting drilling on 13 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope.
Added to a July drilling ban in a portion of the Gulf of Mexico, the president has robbed Americans of energy production across an area larger than Indiana.
It didn’t take long for these actions to alter the market. Global oil prices that had hovered between $70 to $80 a barrel over the summer suddenly lurched above $90. The investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs forecasts oil prices to top $107 a barrel by the end of 2024, which would put prices at the pump close to the all-time record in 2022 of $5 a gallon.
The American Energy Alliance is furious with the administration.
“President Biden says he cares about working-class Americans, but this move proves all he really cares about is appeasing his green donors,” the group’s president, Thomas Pyle, wrote in a statement.
Green is seen as the highest good in elite progressive circles, and as such, eliminating fossil fuels has become their primary goal — only to run into the stumbling block of unenlightened U.S. drivers reluctant to surrender their gasoline-powered cars and trucks for EVs carrying a sticker price averaging $10,000 higher.
Moreover, charging an EV is often more costly than filling the tank with gas, according to a study published in August by the Anderson Economic Group. Analyzing data from the first half of the year, researchers found that gas-powered midsize and crossover vehicles cost $11.08 per 100 miles of driving, while similarly sized EVs cost $12.62 when charged at home and $16.10 when replenished at public chargers.
To be sure, the affordability factor could reverse as gas prices rise or electricity rates fall, the study acknowledges. Keeping a tight grip on the oil supply and driving up gasoline prices, as Mr. Biden is apparently doing, facilitates the switch. Granting federal tax credits of up to $7,500 per electric vehicle also enhances the appearance of EV affordability by transferring part of the sticker price to other taxpayers.
It may be impolite to remind green car shoppers that they are only buying into an illusion, since 75% of the electricity flowing from the nation’s charging stations into EV batteries is produced by natural gas, coal and nuclear energy. Even less welcome in Washington is knowledge that the president is manipulating the energy and vehicle markets to achieve ends that empower and enrich the Democratic Party’s ideological and financial base of support.
As a result, Americans are poorer for buying the Biden brand.
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