Most of our readers understand how this works. The government screws something up, deliberately in most cases, and then pretends to help with the downside of its policy priorities. When that fails, you blame your opponents while regular people suffer.
The New England energy dearth has been an ongoing concern for years. As reliable energy is decommissioned from the grid, nothing reliable has been proposed to replace it. All while heating oil or gas infrastructure has been delayed, sidetracked, or blocked by environmentalist politicians and their green boots on the ground.
The elevation of Joe Biden and his homunculus (Kamala Harris) to the White House alongside a Democrat majority Congress has pushed the Northeast past a tipping point. The Dems’ war on fossil fuels has driven prices up, making the stuff precious and harder to get. With winter days away and a cold and bitter January just weeks away, the folks who had a decade or more to get on the right track picked the wrong one and think sending you a check to pay for overpriced heating oil is the answer.
As I noted here, make sure you ask for small bills, you may need to burn the money to keep warm.
And while getting some of your money back from the crooks in the government is welcome, a check doesn’t make it available to buy.
New Hampshire pushed its own ‘Cash for Oil’ scheme. A stipend to help offset energy prices that have risen in part due to years of inaction or the wrong action by so-called “leadership.” It passed, and I’m sure the check is in the mail, but no one I know has seen one.
Maine tried that too. Gov. Mills wanted to spend 474 million to help Mainers offset the fiscal abuse heaped on them by her political party’s indifference to facts on the ground. Buy some heating oil (or gas or pay for your electric rate hike) but only for a month or two, assuming there’s electricity, oil, or gas.
A handful of the remaining Republicans in that State’s Senate said no, and the measure failed. Mills blamed them.
“A minority of the minority choose to reject this help for Maine people,” Mills said in a written statement. “I urge Senate Republicans to join their other Republican and Democratic colleagues in the Legislature to give this plan the support needed to enact it as an emergency measure so that we can get this relief into the hands of Maine people without delay.”
I didn’t look but does this “relief” include an admission that you are part of why there’s an emergency? That the New England grid needs hydro from Canada or natural gas from Pennsylvania and on and on?
Is there a path to motivate change in DC to overturn old laws so we can get oil or natural gas from the Gulf Coast (instead of Asia or Africa) and have it shipped to the Northeast? Is there any motivation to back pipelines or other much-needed infrastructure?
Has anyone accepted that the math doesn’t work if we try to switch to wind and solar or that the transition (if you are even on onboard with one) will take decades? Or that, yes, we do indeed have plenty of time to find valid alternatives to extend our energy future, and maybe wind and solar are not that?
Or is it just another handout to temporarily assuage the guilt or misdirect culpability (as in the case of Mills blaming Republicans), not that there are no Republicans who bear some blame?
Residents can probably buy cordwood, motor fuel, propane, or kerosene for portable heaters. It’s getting expensive, and maybe the handout helps a little, but giving people some of their money back or giving it to people who never earned it, isn’t relief. It’s more like giving someone fentanyl for chronic pain.
It doesn’t fix the problem, but people become dependent, and without an intervention and a recovery plan, they could become addicted until it kills them.
Or was that the plan all along?
