The White House, CC BY 3.0 US, via Wikimedia Commons
Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed John D. O’Connor.
When Joe Biden ran for his party’s presidential nomination, he cut a deal with Progressives to push an unprecedented climate agenda, and ran unapologetically on it. So when he was elected amid his promises to stop drilling leases on federal lands, offshore exploration, and pipeline approvals, the only likely downside his advisors likely anticipated was a rise in pump prices, which in fact environmentalists welcomed. But few on Biden’s team understood the overall inflationary pressures of a decline in oil and gas supply, upon which the price of every item depends. More significantly, they did not envision how high oil prices, which are caused by predictions of future supply constriction, would finance Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist initiatives. But with windfalls of $100 billion and $30 billion annually for Russia and Iran, respectively, each country has much financial wind at their backs. In an effort to ease pump prices, Biden has silently eased sanctions on Iran, causing its present ramp-up in production by a million barrels per day. Finally, as American borrowers pay more than twice as much for a mortgage as previously, and the price of government borrowing in two-year Treasury bills has tripled, the financial ability of the U.S. to help Ukraine and Israel is profoundly compromised.
Is there a benefit to this extreme cost? Not in light of current developments in climate science, which show the amplification effect of CO2 to be far more modest than modelled by scientists at the beginning of alarmism. So we face extremely negative consequences from our climate policies with little in the way of benefits.