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The Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars on green energy, but last year the U.S. and the world used record amounts of fossil fuels.
This would seem to be prima facie evidence that this “great shift” to renewable energy has so far been a costly policy failure.
The evidence is everywhere: Americans are buying fewer electric cars than they were before President Joe Biden was elected. Even with record federal subsidies, car companies are losing billions of dollars building electric cars people don’t want. Wind and solar still account for less than 10 percent of America’s energy, and hundreds of communities across the country are saying, “I don’t want them in my backyard” to unsightly, sprawling solar and wind farms. And of course, despite the promise of savings from the green revolution, electricity and gas pump prices are 30 to 50 percent higher.
CBS anchor tells Buttigieg that Trump “isn’t wrong” about Biden’s struggles to promote EVs
Case in point: the green energy adoption scandal. Consider the $7.5 billion federal program included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, which Biden has touted as one of his greatest achievements, that promised to install 500,000 EV charging stations across the country.
Instead, they’ve installed a total of — drum roll please — “seven or eight.” To be fair, that was up until last month. Now they may be up to nine.
When asked recently on CBS’ “Face the Nation” what was happening to all that money, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg hesitated: “It takes more than just putting little devices in the ground to build chargers. There are public works projects, and this is actually a new area of federal investment.”
Yes, indeed. Installing a Tesla charger in your garage is an incredibly complicated task. It’s like trying to build the Taj Mahal (which may not have cost $7.5 billion).
I was trapped in my EV in the middle of the night. Progressives don’t want me to know about my nightmare.
Another mystery: why doesn’t Pete give us an exact figure for progress, when the number is so small you could count them on your fingers? At this rate, we might have 500 built by 2030, but not the 500,000 we promised.
Thankfully, our famous Secretary of Transportation, who is known for commuting to his office in Washington by bicycle, was not in charge of the Normandy landings.
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There are also questions about where $7.5 billion in taxpayer money actually went. At the current pace of production, the price tag of the final program could balloon to more than $1 trillion.
If Donald Trump were president, he would have summoned Mayor Pete Trump to the Oval Office a long time ago and greeted him with the two words that made him famous: “You’re fired.”
Instead, many Democrats are privately discussing dropping Biden from the running, and one of the leading candidates to succeed him is none other than the highly accomplished Buttigieg.
But there are some important lessons to be learned from this monumental failure.
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First, Biden gushes about how much money the government is “investing,” but where is the sign that the trillions of borrowed dollars have improved our lives? The EV charger scandal is yet another reminder that governments in general are not “investing” tax money, and are largely wasting it.
Second, competence matters. The Commission on Unlocking Prosperity found that more than 90 percent of Biden’s top economic and financial team has no experience running a business. We have a Secretary of Energy who knows nothing about energy. We have a Secretary of Transportation who knows nothing about transportation. They’re lawyers, academics, politicians, government officials.
They’re not bad people, they just don’t know how to run things, and it shows.
Finally, why would the government need to build EV charging stations? 100 years ago, governments didn’t build gas stations. Gas stations magically appeared all along the roads crisscrossing the United States as entrepreneurs met the demand. A couple of brothers scraped together some money, bought a little piece of land along I-66, built a service station with 4-8 hoses connected to a tank, put up a tall sign with gas prices, and drivers stopped to fill up.
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All of this “infrastructure” was built without a penny or any instructions from Washington.
Can you imagine if Biden had been president in the 1920s and the government had said it would build 500,000 gas stations? They wouldn’t be built and we’d all be waiting in long lines.
To read more articles by Stephen Moore click here
