Biden's Green Hypocrisy on High Gas Prices

President Joe Biden called on Congress to lift the federal gasoline tax

• High gas prices discourage the consumption of fossil fuels
• You don't reduce demand by lowering the price of a good but by raising it
• For decades, environmentalists have argued for a carbon tax, imposed at the point of extraction and then passed on to the consumer
• Rising gas prices also serve the cause of switching the economy to renewable energy sources, heretofore wildly uneconomical compared to fossil fuels

Biden, in other words, is profoundly unserious about global warming

• His counterparts in Europe are just as frivolous
• Germany's economy minister announced on Sunday that Germany would be increasing the burning of coal, the fossil fuel with the greatest carbon emissions, in order to offset the rising cost of natural gas.
• The Dutch climate minister announced that the nation's cabinet "has decided to immediately withdraw the restriction on production for coal-fired power stations."
• Austria is reopening a coal power station that had been taken offline in the service of the climate agenda.

Environmental renunciation is a tautology

• One gives up only what one is prepared to give up and nothing more.
• Politicians mouth climate change platitudes until the moment reality threatens to put those platitudes into practice-with all of their real-world costs.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.

• City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank.

 

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