Just this once, I hope NOAA is right. They predict a warmer-than-normal winter, and we’re going to need that. After nearly six years as our US Senator, Maggie Hassan “Hassn’t” done a damn thing to help us heat our homes in winter.
Related: Winter is Coming: Is It Time for New England to “Pay” the Green Energy Piper?
She’s done quite the opposite.
A significant barrier to ensuring access to natural gas or heating oil for the northeast, aside from Democrat policy and their war on energy infrastructure, is The Jones Act. Josiah Bartlett has an excellent round-up of that here (and a story about Fed agencies blocking efforts to amend or repeal it), so I won’t go deep into this space. At its simplest, The Jones Act forces us to buy foreign oil and gas carried on foreign tankers should the need arise, and it does.
In 2019 we were paying through the nose to places like Russia for natural gas in the spot market. We’ll do that again this year, even if NOAA is correct – if there’s any to be had. But the point is that given one of the higher offices in elected-land, after standing with the no pipelines or fracking crowd, Maggie Hassn’t done a thing to ensure we had backup.
If you search Maggie’s press page for the “Jones Act,” you get this.
That’s not to say she’s done nothing. There is no shortage of press asking the Feds to spend more on LIHEAP, the low-income home energy assistance handouts, but that’s not going to help if there is nothing to buy, which is a precipice upon which we may soon find ourselves.
Long Time Comin’
As regular readers know, the energy infrastructure deficit in the northeast has been a problem for more years than Hassan has been in the US Senate (and all the years she was NH’s Governor), but she’s done nothing we can reference to address that problem. Even when US supplies were abundant, The Jones Act prohibited delivery to Northeast ports from places like Texas “to protect US shipbuilders from foreign competition.”
This indifference has driven up prices while creating the potential for blackouts mid-winter.
Senator Shaheen, whom Maggie Has-been has always tried to emulate, is also to blame. She has spent our tax dollars with abandon since January 2009 but has nothing to say that I could find about the Jones Act in her press archives.
Related: Hold on To Your Wallets – New England’s Governors Promising Regional Energy Improvements
But she has done us the favor of showing her real priorities.
At the top of Shaheen’s US Senate home page, and on every page I visited, there is guidance on how to get an abortion, followed by how to save a few bucks with credits and incentives to reduce energy usage.
But they’ve got the reduce-usage problem solved. If there’s no “energy,” that should reduce usage. Is that what they mean?
Probably not, but no ‘Jones Act’ Press, while I bet there are plenty of giddy releases about wind or solar projects (I didn’t look), or EVs, or shutting down coal or nuclear. I’m sure there is press about the climate scam. Warming and emissions. Ironic that.
And look how much of that non-existent money was spent (to drive up inflation) for other “programs,” just nothing we truly need (like being warm).
Jones Act. Say it with me. J-O-N-E-S A-C-T.
We need fossil fuels to heat our homes. We need heating oil and natural gas (and Diesel) to generate electricity. And while we can’t do much about Granny Shaheen for a few more years, Hassan’s indifference is a problem we can solve next Tuesday.
So let’s solve it.
Leave her out in the Electoral cold. Vote her out of office. Just do it. They’ll hardly even notice one less Democrat in Washington. The place is filthy with those things. They’re everywhere. And she can spend the winter here with us, in New Hampshire – starting in January.
As for Shaheen, there might be a way to move her needle on this issue.
“Dear Senator Shaheen. Please help repeal or amend The Jones Act, or Abortion clinics in New Hampshire might have to deprive women of essential services due to a lack of heat or electricity.”
Do you think that will work?
