Along with facing public backlash over her failures as President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris will now also have to answer for her role in advancing the administration’s radical climate agenda that has left American families paying higher prices for everything from gas to groceries.
While Harris continues to enjoy a honeymoon with the corporate media following her ascension to the top of the Democrat ticket, millions of American families are not feeling the love as “Bidenomics” – which Harris has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for – continues to ravage household budgets. Although the administration was quick to tout a slight drop in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in June, that tiny decrease was the first time since Biden took office that CPI had eased.
However, CPI is still up three percent year-over-year for the past 12 months, and is up a staggering 22 percent since January 2021.
Energy prices in particular have driven increases in CPI – a reflection of both the administration’s spending priorities and regulatory assault on the American energy sector. Energy costs have soared a staggering 30 percent under Biden, a rate 13 times faster than the previous seven years. Over the past year alone, electricity prices have increased 4.4 percent, while natural gas has risen by 3.7 percent.
Increased fuel costs, meanwhile, have had a cascading effect throughout the rest of the economy. The price for a gallon of gasoline is currently hovering above $3.40, nearly a dollar higher than when Biden took office. Diesel fuel, meanwhile, has seen an increase of just over a dollar per gallon.
As a result, everything from eggs to furniture has increased in cost as companies fork over more to transport their products.
Most infuriatingly for everyday families, these cost increases are not simply part of “global economic trends” as the Biden-Harris administration has insisted for the past four years. Instead, the president and vice president have actively implemented policies that led to these increases.
A recent report from the American Energy Alliance (AEA) has identified 225 specific policy decisions the Biden-Harris administration has taken that were “deliberately designed to make it harder to produce energy in America.”
Those decisions started with a spate of executive orders from Biden on day one of his presidency, including canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, implementing a moratorium on new drilling permits on federal lands, and using EPA regulatory powers to artificially increase the cost of oil and gas production.
AEA’s timeline shows that hardly a month has passed during Biden’s presidency without new rules or regulations on the fossil fuels industry, even amid ballooning energy costs. In November 2021, for instance, Biden enacted 15 new restrictions on oil and gas production. In March 2022, that number was 18.
Most recently, in May, Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm signed an agreement with Turkey “to discourage investment in oil & gas projects through influencing international financial institutions to combat climate change,” while Biden-Harris officials at the G7 also signed an agreement to “phase out” coal as an energy source – even as the U.S. grid struggles to meet existing demand.
Meanwhile, the administration has also continued to funnel American taxpayer resources to addressing the supposed “climate crisis,” including by distributing billions to foreign countries. Last December, Kamala Harris touted the administration’s goal to invest $11 billion by 2024 in the “Green Climate Fund” – essentially the U.N.’s slush fund for expensive and unreliable green energy projects.
Every measure outlined by AEA has been harmful to American families in its own way. August Fritz de Riehl, a Retired Austrian Economics Professor, told me that the transformation led by Biden has “turned a once investment-friendly business environment for all forms of energy under Trump into a punishing, costly, and unfeasible system.”
“This shift caused numerous entrepreneurs to bypass the United States,” he added.
Retired economist Professor Joachim Buchholz, who previously advised Chancellor Helmut Kohl on industrial policies, also told me that “it is clear” that the White House “caused energy price shocks” over the past four years. “It behaved as if the U.S. economy could be centrally commanded,” he continued. “It punished affordable energy producers.”
But for American companies and families, the last four years under Biden are likely only a small sample of what could come under a potential Kamala Harris administration. As a Senator in 2019, Harris cosponsored the Green New Deal, the far more extreme version of the climate agenda that made it into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – which Harris also cast the tiebreaking vote on.
Harris has also repeatedly said that she would ban fracking if she were president, a move that would dramatically slash U.S. production capacity and threaten tens of thousands of jobs.
By all available evidence, Harris has embraced the most extreme elements of the left’s climate agenda. If she manages to replace her boss in the Oval Office this November, Americans may be longing for the days when their electricity bill was up by only 30 percent.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
