So this post will be a little political, but laying all my cards on the table: global warming is happening and does need to be fixed. Decarbonization and renewables is a laudable goal that our country and world should be working towards. With that said, why are the environmental champions bemoaning the consequences of their own actions? For a long time, Democrats have been reminding us that raising the price of gas is the quickest way to make people use less of it. And this is absolutely true, as price goes up, demand goes down. In addition to direct carbon taxes, Democrats were proud to campaign on reducing domestic fracking and the production of oil and pipelines for the entirety of the Trump presidency. But now it feels like an “oh no, the consequences of my own actions” moment as the price of gas rises and Democratic administrations struggle to lower the price at the pump. The Strategic Oil Reserve has been emptying in order to reduce prices, many Democratic controlled states have suspended their gas taxes, some states are directly compensating drivers. All these things subsidize the price of gas and therefore increase it’s usage. Which is absolutely contrary to every effort and piece of climate messaging we’ve seen for the past 5 years at least.

I just feel like this should have been obvious, if domestic oil production goes down, then the price of gas will go up. We should have known that people wouldn’t like the price of gas going up, and someone should have thought about “how do we mitigate the harm to consumers if the price of gas goes up?” But instead that question was ignored, and now since the price of gas has gone up due to things outside the Democrats’ control (OPEC, Russia), the only response is to desperately try to bring the cost back down again. It makes a nonsense of all the efforts that came before it. There are ways to mitigate the harm to consumers brought about by the price of gas, but it should have been obvious that this would be the result of pro-climate policies.