Democrats have found the new Golden Goose for the elections. Affordability. If they win, I would not hold my breath for prices to drop.
And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our who lives depend on it. And hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car including yours. It’s in tennis rackets, lipsticks, refrigerators, antihistamines, pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that’s not made of animal or plant fibers. Soap, f****g hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats, you name it. Every f****g thing. And you know what the kicker is? We’re going to run out of it before we find its replacement.”
Tommy Norris (played by Billy Bob Thornton) explaining the need for oil to attorney Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace) in Landman.
Last week on my Facebook memories I saw this post:
Eleven years ago, I was paying $2.35 for a gallon of gas. I checked with Google, after O’Bidenflation this should be $3.19. On November 26th, I paid $2.29 for a gallon. By Black Friday, it was down to $2.22. I’ve seen it as low as $2.19 on November 29th.
It started my brain moving. In the 70s I recall then President Jimmy Carter saying, “We must all use less energy, and pay more for it.” He put in a “windfall profits” tax to fund research to get us off of oil, onto “alternative energy.” Sound familiar?
Thankfully Jimmy Carter was replaced by the best president in my 60 years, Ronald Reagan. One day one, Rawhide deregulated the oil industry and yes, oil prices did rise. For about six months. Then they started to drop and we had steady oil supply at market prices for a quarter century
Monday morning I was looking at the NY Times and its recent discovery of what will bring the Democrats back to the power that is theirs by divine right. Affordability.
‘The New Price of Eggs.’ The Political Shocks of Data Centers and Electric Bills
Democrats zeroed in on utilities and affordability to win Republican support in upset elections in Georgia and Virginia. Can the same playbook work in 2026?
As loyal Republicans, Reece Payton said that he and his family of cattle ranchers in Hogansville, Ga., had one thing on their minds when they cast their ballots in November for the state’s utility board — “to make a statement…”
…In some of Georgia’s reddest and most rural counties, Republicans crossed party lines this month and helped propel two Democrats, Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson, to landslide upsets, ousting the incumbent candidates on the Georgia Public Service Commission. No Democrat has served on the five-person commission, which regulates utilities and helps set climate and energy policy, since 2007.
Across the country, Democrats have seized on rising anxiety over electricity costs and data centers in what could be a template for the 2026 midterm elections.
In Virginia, Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger pledged during her campaign to lower energy bills and make data centers pay more. In the House of Delegates, one Democratic challenger unseated a Republican incumbent by focusing on curbing the proliferation of data centers in Loudoun County and the exurbs of the nation’s capital…
…“Electricity is the new price of eggs,” said Charles Hua, executive director of Powerlines, a nonpartisan organization which aims to modernize utility regulations and reduce power bills. “This is a defining moment for politicians of all stripes — what’s your answer to lowering utility bills? Because I think consumers and voters are looking for leadership on this.”
Electricity prices. Interesting, seeing every Democratic administration does everything it can to limit our supplies of energy. One day one Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and refused to issue permits on thousands of offshore oil leases already issued. In other words, we could see the oil, ready for drilling. We just couldn’t get to it.
Wanting us to abandon the internal combustion engine and switch to electric everything, how would be generate the electricity? Windmills and solar panels. To say the least, unreliable at this time.
A peer reviewed article in Energy explains the major issue of renewables. Intermittency. Solar and wind power generation ebbs and flows. Also the physical footprint of a power source for is much larger than coal, natural gas, hydroelectric or nuclear power. It goes without saying, the latter four sources are not reliant on good weather. From the article, emphasis mine:
However, the function of supply in electricity markets is not to generate electricity but to provide a specified amount of electricity to a specific place at a particular time. The locational aspect adds significant additional costs to renewables that are generally less flexible about where they can be sited than fossil fuel plants. As a result, a larger grid is required to transport the electricity from, e.g., hydropower plants to the demand in urban areas. These transmission costs are partly taken care of in some LCOE estimates when a transmission cost adder is included in the LCOE. But the timing aspect turns out to be even more crucial and the focus of this paper. Many renewables (like wind and solar) are intermittent and non-dispatchable (hereafter referred to just as “intermittent” unless further specified), and some that are not intermittent (like run-of-river-hydro) are often not fully dispatchable.
In simple English, renewables are not reliable forms of energy at this time. Pushing us to indeterminate sources of electricity while significantly increasing the demand will, of course, cause prices to skyrocket.
Other examples. When the federal government got into funding college education, miraculously the cost of college started to explode above the rate of inflation. All while getting more money from the taxpayers. One of the many disastrous events of the Obama years was Net “Neutrally,” where the government would control internet service providers. The result was lower quality service at higher cost. Repealing it in 2017 encouraged more investment in internet infrastructure, increasing supply and lowering cost. Anyone want to go back to dialup service of the 1990s? Today you can go almost anywhere in the US and get an internet connection in public.
Seeing Democrats say electricity is the new “egg” is amusing. After slaughtering over 100 million hens, the supply of eggs naturally collapsed. It never occurred to the liberals in the O’Biden administration that America is not the only source of poultry in the world. They never worked to import more eggs, allowing increased supply to lower price.
So yes, I really wonder how Democrats will sell “we’ll make it cheaper for you.” First point I would make is Republicans, as a rule, don’t vote as much as Democrats in off year elections. Democrats goosestep to the polls every time they are ordered to by the party. So a few local elections is not a major indicator of a change of national voting patterns.
Also, nothing (energy, food, health care, housing) Democrats have managed over the last few decades has decreased in cost. Or increased in quality, e.g., the pathetic state of American education. If the GOP can articulate these facts, they will do fine on the midterms. And if they follow up on their promises, the country will be much better off.
Michael A. Thiac is a retired Army intelligence officer, with over 23 years experience, including serving in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. He is also a retired police patrol sergeant, with over 22 years’ service, and over ten year’s experience in field training of newly assigned officers. He has been published at The American Thinker, PoliceOne.com, and on his personal blog, A Cop’s Watch.
Opinions expressed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of current or former employers.
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