Is Paying More For Gas Your Patriotic Duty?
In recent weeks we have been told, inexplicably, that tolerating high gas prices is our patriotic duty. In a world that has suddenly become very black and white, we’re apparently part of the war effort in support of Ukraine. Even the Deseret News editorial board last month made this very claim, and attempted to shame Americans who can’t afford skyrocketing fuel prices.
This presidential administration has spent nearly a year-and-a-half working to shut down domestic energy production in the United States, and we now find ourselves begging for oil from Iran while blaming Putin for high prices. There just might be more to this story than some would have us believe.
Talking Points Inserted Into Nationwide Media
If you remember, a few weeks ago Stephen Colbert joked about being happy to pay $15/gallon gas because he drives an expensive electric vehicle (EV). The Deseret News editorial board approves.
Forget the poor and middle-class Americans, already living paycheck to paycheck. Forget the young college students struggling to fill up their car to get to school and work. They have a patriotic duty, after all. To Ukraine.
This isn’t even just about your own car, and your own gas tank, either. Are we so detached from the sources of our subsistence that we don’t even ask how our food is produced, how it arrives on our supermarket shelves or restaurant tables?
Inflation Rising At Unprecedented Rates For Months On End
Prior to the start of this war, we were already facing unprecedented inflation. Despite the early soothing words of the Federal Reserve, nothing about this inflation threat was ever transitory. Our federal government has created and dumped trillions of new dollars into our economy, ostensibly to help the poor and middle-class while, in reality, enriching the wealthy and well-connected.
The Deseret News editorial board’s solution? Why, of course, expensive EVs that will draw power from what is, in many states, an overburdened and increasingly undependable power grid! If it’s a good enough solution for a late night comedian on TV, certainly it’s good enough for you.
This is a difficult suggestion to even take seriously, but let’s for a moment pretend that EVs are the answer to weakening the power of tyrannical dictators in oil-rich countries around the world, like Russia. Because, remember … war.
The Movement Toward Energy Independence
Becoming energy independent is actually a worthy pursuit. Technological development has allowed us to briefly achieve it in recent years. We now have an administration with other ideas.
We’ve also stopped purchasing Russian coal. By the way, the coal-fired power plants that produce our energy to charge those EVs need coal to run. But I’m sure we can ramp up coal mining in the US to make up the difference and run those green EVs.
If the purpose of our boycott is to starve tyrannical governments, I hope we’re planning to do a whole lot more mining of all kinds of rocks and minerals throughout the US. After all, who do we think owns most of the rare earth elements around the world necessary for EV production?
Follow The Science
In 2019, an analysis was done that calculated the rare earth elements necessary to convert all cars in the U.K to electric. The findings are astounding. Based on this analysis, we can easily determine the mined elements necessary to do the same in the U.S.
Before we’ve even considered the increased strain on the power grid and the additional coal and/or natural gas that would be required to supply it, here are the numbers required to transition U.S. automobiles to electric:
-
Eighteen times the total annual world production of cobalt
-
Over 800 percent of current neodymium production
-
More than six times the world’s lithium production
-
In excess of 100 percent of world copper production
What is meant by 'Solutions?'
There’s a reason the market as a whole rejects these “solutions” when given an option, and at this point in time they will only be implemented through bad government policy. Technological sustainability just isn’t there on a broad scale.
While these “solutions” are being presented to the American people, mining within our own country is threatened every day by the very groups that insist on this transition to a system that would require massive new production. It is their very insistence against such production that we have become unnecessarily dependent on foreign regimes; the ones they now claim we can do without.
Despite what theorists and editorial board writers may claim, it is the workers in the oil fields, the truckers on our roads, and the service providers living paycheck to paycheck who overwhelmingly pay the price for these types of bad federal policy. In the end, the destruction of the free market system that has lifted more individuals out of poverty across the world than any government-devised solution could ever hope to do, leaves all of us paying a hefty price.
