Did we miss the spectacular news?
Did we overlook the news that Joe Biden has chosen his post-Prez profession? That he’s announced his intent to design, manufacture, transport, and sell so-called “green” household heating appliances?
No. Biden never even intimated at such plans to enter the free market and peacefully compete to attract consumer interest. Instead, he’s using $85 million to prop up his pet “Climate Cult” members: the makers of said “green” appliances that already are not attracting consumer interest.
Nifty.
As Owen Klinsky reports for The Daily Caller:
“The Biden administration is deploying roughly $85 million to boost production of a green appliance despite plummeting consumer demand, according to a Wednesday press release from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).”
But, why get upset? After all, this is the ever-loving, unquestioningly “constitutional,” Department of Energy – the central “authority” that already has brought about the demise of the incandescent Edison light bulb, already worked to slowly strangle the sale of natural gas stoves, claimed it is “saving” consumers money by imposing anti-market mandates on the makers of clothes washers and dryers, introduced new mandates that will force homebuilders and buyers to install only certain kinds of gas furnaces, and subsidized electric bus makers with sketchy ties to the woman who HEADS the Department of Energy.
Why worry? It’s totally fine. Totally constitutional. Totally ethical.
Writes Klinsky:
“The White House on Wednesday announced nearly $85 million in grants for four producers of electric heat pumps, the DOE wrote in a statement. The announcement comes despite cratering demand for the electric appliance, with total U.S. shipments of the product falling 16% in 2023 despite the federal tax credit being raised from $300 to $2,000 in January 2023, according to a study from the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.”
What a relief, for a moment, it seemed as if the government might allow those ignorant, brain-addled consumers their God-given right to peacefully buy what they want, and allow manufacturers of household heaters the chance to make and sell what they want, free from fascist diktats and subsidies to their “heat pump” competitors.
But this continues the plan of attack on which we at MRCTV reported in November of last year, an attack that sees the feds pull a Soviet-style central plan to prop-up widely rejected “heat-pumps” in their tired, hoary, egomaniacal attempt to tell others how to live – all backed up by their weave of insubstantial, unsubstantiated claims of “anthropogenic climate change” that we at MRCTV so often have shown to be of no substance and to have been tied to corrupt propaganda.
And so the plan to pump-up the sales-suffering “heat pump” makers continues, apace.
“’The Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America agenda is manufacturing hundreds of thousands of energy-saving heat pumps here in the USA, helping American households and businesses keep money in their pockets,’ Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in the release.”
Yes, that’s Jennifer Granholm, who, after helping electric bus maker Proterra get millions in federal subsidies when she was governor of Michigan, was brought on the board of Proterra after she left office, then was given a big Proterra stock package upon leaving the board and just prior to joining the Bidenistas as so-called “Energy Secretary,” and the, yep, who sold her stock for nearly $3 million just weeks prior to Proterra filing for federal bankruptcy.
Yeah, Jennifer Granholm. You can thank her, anytime you like.
“Heat pumps cost an average of $10,750 to install, as opposed to an average cost of $4,700 for a new furnace in 2024, according to Forbes. Heat pumps have also become significantly less cost-effective to operate, with average U.S. residential electricity prices rising 6.2% in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Meanwhile, natural gas prices have plummeted more than 70% in the past two years from nearly $9/MMBtu in August 2022 to record lows of under $2/MMBtu in 2024, the EIA reported.”
Well, we’ll just have to be sure that the Biden Administration keeps trying to undercut natural gas exploration and importation, to change that downward price-for-gas curve and make the “heat-pump” daisies more attractive.
Central planning sure is awesome.
Related: Biden's Controversial Push for Electric Heat Pumps Using Defense Act
Klinsky also refers to the matter about which we warned in November:
“The $85 million in grants are the second round of funding the Biden administration has provided to heat pump manufacturing, with the administration unleashing $169 million to subsidize nine projects in November 2023.
‘Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, the United States is supercharging U.S. clean energy manufacturing, which is creating good-paying jobs, lowering families’ energy costs, and helping tackle the climate crisis, all while boosting our nation’s energy security,’ White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in the DOE press release.”
Are you, also, becoming tired of politicians claiming that every dumb and immoral plan they concoct has some bearing on so-called “security”?
“In February, the Biden administration finalized regulations increasing minimum water and energy efficiency levels for residential washers and dryers. Meanwhile, in April, the White House enacted a rule banning gas stoves and appliances in federal buildings.”
How about they ban federal buildings? We’d save a lot, if that were done.
Of course, those “federal buildings” represent something important. On the whole, they stand as monuments to the metastasizing, pernicious parasitic central government and its hubristic occupants, the ever-growing leviathan that, regardless of the purported constitutional constraints and clearly limited “powers,” expand their claims of power in an ever more fascistic federal paradigm.
Adds Klinsky:
“Biden’s regulatory blitz on appliances is expected to increase expenses for the average American home by more than $9,000.
President Joe Biden is using his ‘wartime emergency powers’ authorized under the Defense Production Act, in conjunction with the Inflation Reduction Act, to unleash the taxpayer dollars needed to fund the heat pump projects.
‘[Using] Defense Production Act funds for heat pump manufacturing show[s] that President Biden is treating climate change as the crisis it is,’ John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for clean energy innovation and implementation, said of the first round of funding in November 2023.”
Ahh, yes. The “Defense Production Act.” You know, because there’s no constitutionally declared War, so, why not magically claim “wartime emergency powers”? And how about that “Inflation Reduction Act”? It didn’t reduce inflation. It increased the payload of propaganda and federal spending we have to suffer.
It would be a different matter if the Joe Bidens, Kamala Harrises, and Jennifer Granholms of this world left office and tried their schemes in a free market. They’d be operating in a peaceful manner, and they wouldn’t be forcing us to subsidize things we don’t want.
But that’s not their preference. Clearly, they prefer to take our cash, push around appliance makers, steer industries and energy preferences, and screw up the market.
They are dangerous and assumptive, and not one iota of their silly rhetoric will hide that fact.