Two weeks before Election Day, I wrote here that the 2026 midterm elections would turn out to be the “gasoline prices are too damn high” election, not the data center election. Despite punditry still pointing to data centers today as the big issue, the polls show that far more voters all over the country had the economy on their minds, with prices for gas and diesel atop their list of economic issues when they went to the polls.
It’s always the economy, stupid, as James Carville became famous for saying.
The problem for Republicans — and for President Donald Trump — was the crystal clear cause-and-effect relationship between the Iran Conflict and the prices at the pump. There was simply no denying that the extra $15 to $20 bucks drivers were paying every time they filled up was a direct consequence of the war Mr. Trump kicked off on Feb. 28.
The President’s rhetoric on the subject — constantly stating that higher gas prices were no big deal when compared to preventing the Iranian regime from getting a nuclear bomb — was not helpful, whether one agreed with it or not. It showed the leader of the Republican Party to be completely out of touch with the struggles of working families on the matter.
For Americans living paycheck to paycheck, as most Americans still do, the price of gasoline is more than an economic issue: It’s also an emotional one because they have no choice but to pay the price, no matter how high it goes.
President Trump and his party lost sight of that reality in this election, just as President Barack Obama and the Democrat Party lost sight of the average American’s emotional feelings related to rising medical costs and suffered a similar wipeout in the 2010 midterms.
To be fair, the data center issue did show up big in some key races. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown beat incumbent Sen. John Husted after branding him “the face of data centers,” according to Fortune, which also noted that Husted had been “basically at every single ribbon cutting for data centers across the state.”
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed held a rally in front of the OpenAI-Oracle campus site in Saline Township and ran on a “no rate hikes” promise. In Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand won the governor’s race promising to make data centers “pay their own way,” as reported by NewsNation.
But then, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and other Texas Republicans running for statewide offices made exactly the same pledge related to data centers. Every one of those Republicans were defeated by big margins. Why? Because the prices for gasoline and diesel overshadowed everything. The AP put it bluntly in its post-election analysis: “Voters could see it clearly in their receipts from grocery stores and gasoline stations.”
It’s always the economy, stupid, and gas and diesel prices are the biggest issue facing voters in an economy that is strong overall.
Let’s look at the receipts. On Election Day, AAA reported the national average for regular gasoline was $4.15 per gallon, with Diesel sitting at a whopping $6.29 — the highest prices ever recorded on a national general election day. That’s about a 35% increase year-over-year on gas and a 70% rise in diesel from a year before. That’s an emotional thing for most voters.
As stated above, the cause of those price shocks was no mystery. Crude oil prices quickly spiked after the start of the Iran Conflict, taking gasoline prices along for the leap. Ukraine’s highly effective drone attacks on Russian refineries played a major role in causing the even bigger blowout in diesel prices over the same time period.
Taken together, American consumers find themselves paying higher prices not just to fill up their tanks, but for all consumers goods that are transported on ships, trucks and trains that run on diesel.
This isn’t complicated. Data centers made headlines and dominated specific campaigns in specific parts of the country. But the high costs for gasoline and diesel were the deciders nationwide. It’s always the economy, stupid, the price for gas was too damn high, and the cause-and-effect too crystal clear to hide.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Since the approval of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 by every nation on earth except the United States, the ever-compliant global media has flooded newsprint, airwaves and digital space with narratives that China is moving away from coal. We have been assured by tens of thousands of scholarly, peer-reviewed “studies” that the communist government there is rapidly displacing its gigantic fleet of coal power plants — bigger than the rest of the word’s combined — with glorious solar panels and windmills and battery arrays so enormous they’d cover Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch in the Texas panhandle.
It all makes for a glorious narrative, one heavily encouraged by Xi Jinping’s government in its ceaseless drive for acceptance by the global community and accumulation of geopolitical and hegemonic leverage. The narrative has gained such a high level of acceptance that China is invariably treated at the annual COP and World Economic Forum events as a full participant in the impossible globalist drive for Net Zero by 2050 even though its own nebulous commitments do not even begin to kick in until 2060 and beyond. In the meantime, China continues to expand its coal power fleet and ramp up its mining operations every year, a fact which seems to always be “unexpected” by the media’s preferred “experts” on such things.
Just one problem: It’s all a myth. In a recent analysis, Canadian energy analyst Dr. Joseph Fournier details the realty, which is that the Xi government remains as wedded to coal as former British prince Harry remains wedded to former Netflix star Meghan Markle. Fournier points out the fact that Chinese policymakers framed coal as “the sea-calming divine needle (a reference to the mythical magic staff of Sun WuKong) or ballast stone of national energy security” in the country’s 14th Five-Year Energy plan published in 2020. That framing continues to shape the 15th Five-Year plan published earlier this month, in which authors reaffirm coal’s role as the country’s “foundational” energy source.
This year’s planning report does emphasize “clean and efficient utilization” of coal, as well as “promoting the peaking” of its use, but stops short of specifying the year in which said glorious “peak” might happen or how many years the period of phasing it all down will take. Why play such word games? Because again, it’s all a grand game.
Not that the Chinese haven’t invested massively in wind and solar – they certainly have, so much so that the country’s “renewable” sector contributed as much as 10% to China’s gross domestic product in 2024. Of course, the troublesome reality there is that those wind, solar and battery installations and exports were manufactured in factories powered by coal, fed by raw metals mined by diesel-powered heavy equipment, realities the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN) and their media cheerleaders prefer to ignore.
They’ve built so much of the stuff in fact that this year has seen record levels of curtailment of these weather-reliant energy sources. An estimated 360 terawatt hours of wind and solar went wasted during the first half of 2026 alone, a near-50% year-over-year increase.
The latest Five-Year Plan goes on to call for strengthening coal’s regulatory function within a “new-type power system,” concentrating production in northern security bases, modernizing mines to reduce emissions and pollution and diversifying some coal enterprises into chemicals and other industrial businesses. It also emphasizes methane controls and efficiency upgrades for existing plants but predictably makes no mention of hard consumption caps or rapid retirement schedules.
So, should we really expect China, a nation with transparent designs on global domination, to just voluntarily surrender its Divine Needle to gain praise from climate alarm prophets of the global order? Don’t be silly.
That brings us to another troublesome reality which Dr. Fournier describes: The fact that, at current consumption levels, China’s domestic coal supplies will be essentially depleted over the next 30 years or so. In his report, Fournier says the evidence at hand “does not describe a nation merely hedging against uncertainty. It describes a state systematically preparing for regional war and coercive resource acquisition.”
After all, energy security is in fact inseparable from national security. Why would any rational person expect China to voluntarily give up on protecting that?
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Faced with the general craziness stemming from voters’ decisions to nominate far-left radical DSA candidates to represent the party in congressional races in half a dozen states now, Democrats are working overtime to mask their party’s true agenda from the general public. The fear that the party’s increasing radicalism will alienate independent voters in the November mid-term elections has party officials worried it could cost them the chance to win majorities in the House and/or the Senate.
The issues of prominent concern are obvious: Abolishing prisons without a viable alternative; de-funding police and ICE simultaneously; reopening the borders a la the Biden autopen presidency; Medicare for all; packing the supreme court; ending the filibuster; abolishing the electoral college and even the U.S. Senate. Taken together it’s an agenda so nutty that it has Axios speculating whether even Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just too “moderate” now to sign onto it all.
If you saw that coming as 2026 dawned, you should quit your day job and play the betting markets.
Now, we find out that AOC’s original pet issue during her first few months in congress — the climate change narrative — is among the agenda items the Democrat party’s leaders want candidates to mask. Readers may remember that, in just her 2nd month of serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, Ocasio-Cortez teamed with leftwing Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to sponsor the massive, $90 trillion reorganization of the U.S. economy they called the Green New Deal.
It was a monstrosity of Soviet-style command-and-control regulation and central government planning which would relegate all Americans to give up their cars, abandon vacation travel, eliminate personal airline usage, build a fantasy network of high-speed rail lines, and relegate the masses to living tiny, immobile lives in 15-minute cities while their central government elites lived the high life as if nothing had changed.
The proposed legislation went nowhere, of course, being laughed out of the room by Republicans and independents alike, but the seed had been planted. Joe Biden was installed into the White House in January 2021 and, aided by a massive propaganda campaign free of charge in the legacy media, embarked on a set of energy and climate policies designed to at least get the camel’s nose under the tent to stake the ground for a form of Green New Deal to come.
But my, what a difference five years makes. Democrat candidates are being advised now to avoid the climate change topic at all costs in this year’s midterms. Sen. Markey himself barely mentions the topic in his primary campaign against Seth Moulton, preferring to focus on other more mainstream topics.
“Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got. That is not the case now,” Mary Anne Marsh, a veteran Democratic strategist in Massachusetts, told PBS. Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director at the far-left climate alarm group the Sunrise Movement, says in the same piece that, “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues.”
That makes sense, given that freaking out about all manner of things is a core competency of leftwing activists and politicians. But the party’s vow of omerta about climate change doesn’t sit well with every Democrat. One dissenter, Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, believes the party’s tactic of hiding its climate agenda amounts to a strategic blunder.
“Climate change has moved from the science department into the economics department,” he said. “It’s now battering people’s home insurance, property values, pocketbook concerns. So I think it’s a very powerful argument.”
The problem, of course, is that climate change does not poll well — it never has. It always ranks at or near the bottom of issues voters most care about in poll after poll. Politicians interested in winning elections naturally tend to want to focus on issues people do care about. In this year’s Democrat party primaries, the voters heavily tilt towards leftwingers who are freaking out about anything President Donald Trump is in favor of.
For Democrats, masking their real agenda on climate change makes sense until the election season ends. After that, all bets will be off.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a major report on extreme event attribution science, the increasingly trendy climate alarmism field that tries to pin specific hurricanes, heat waves, or floods on human-caused climate change and, more importantly, on the oil and gas companies activists love to sue.
The headlines from the usual media suspects will predictably claim the science has “advanced.” What they won’t emphasize is the report’s own admission that the field still faces “significant challenges,” or the roster of climate litigation partisans who helped shape it.
President Donald Trump immediately questioned the report’s legitimacy, and the reason why is pretty simple: The report was heavily influenced by academics and activists with apparent conflicts of interest.
One example is Michael Burger of Columbia’s Sabin Center, who also serves as of counsel to the Sher Edling firm in Honolulu’s climate lawfare effort targeting the oil and gas industry. In that role, Burger could benefit if courts start accepting these studies as proof of liability. The report’s acknowledgments thank him anyway while making no meaningful disclosure of his conflicts.
Oh.
But wait, there are more! Delta Merner of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who runs their Climate Accountability Campaign and Science Hub for — guess what? — Climate Litigation, served on the committee itself into early 2025.
Jessica Wentz, another Sabin Center figure previously tied to a now-rescinded Federal Judicial Center climate chapter written by litigation advocates, shows up in the acknowledgments.
So does Michael Wehner, linked to the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which trains judges on these very issues. One of the report’s own authors, Joyce Kimutai, has publicly argued that the “bar is too high” for using attribution in court and that the burden of proof should flip to the defendants. That’s not science talking. That’s advocacy.
The National Academies’ own conflict-of-interest policy demands advice “free from undue influence” from interested parties. This lineup makes a mockery of that standard.
Yet even with all that help from the climate lawfare complex, the NAS could not bring itself to declare victory for attribution science. Committee chair James Hurrell noted that the field “still faces challenges, and addressing them is necessary to fully realize the value of attribution science.”
Confidence in results “varies significantly across different types of extremes.” In other words, the science remains uneven, incomplete, and not ready to play the primetime role in the courtroom sought by activists for years.
That quest dates back at least to the 2012 Rockefeller-funded La Jolla conference, where participants openly discussed using attribution to link emissions to specific harms for litigation purposes.
Even then, they admitted “many challenges” in getting the science right. By 2021, researchers including Friederike Otto were conceding that plaintiffs were failing to overcome causation hurdles in court because the evidence simply didn’t connect individual emitters to specific losses. Five years later, after relentless pressure and Biden-era institutional capture, the NAS is still saying the same thing: significant challenges remain.
Attribution science was never pure science-based inquiry. It was purpose-built to support a coordinated campaign of lawsuits aimed at extracting settlements, driving up energy costs, and ultimately bankrupting or nationalizing parts of the fossil fuel industry.
Courts have mostly resisted so far because judges still require actual evidence of causation, not probabilistic storytelling disguised as settled science. The NAS report unintentionally underscores why those lawsuits keep stumbling.
Americans should pay attention. When activists capture scientific bodies, the product is not better science.
Instead, what we get for our taxpayer dollars are better press releases and stronger talking points for trial lawyers. The real-world energy system still runs on oil, natural gas, and coal because those fuels deliver affordable, reliable power.
Efforts to litigate them out of existence based on incomplete attribution models will inevitably produce the results that are impacting our pocketbooks in real time: higher energy costs, weakened reliability, all with zero impact on global temperatures.
The NAS had a chance to produce a clear-eyed assessment. Instead, it produced a document that both acknowledges the science’s limits and carries the fingerprints of the very people hoping to use it as a legal weapon.
That’s not how independent science works. It’s how lawfare works.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Every time you think the energy policies pushed by the Democratic Party can’t possibly get any crazier, they go and fool you again.
Politico’s E&E News published an article Friday with a headline that should scare the bejeebers out of anyone who hopes for sanity in energy policy: “Progressives look to recharge the Green New Deal for the AI era.”
The piece quotes Melat Kiros, the socialist who unseated longtime incumbent Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette in the party’s recent Colorado primary as saying, “The Green New Deal, frankly, is a floor now, not a ceiling, for what we need to actually be looking at doing.”
This, of course, parrots the classic mantra of every generation of new socialists, who, when presented with the reality that socialism fails disastrously everywhere it is tried, invariably claim that it just hasn’t been done the right way, and they know better.
But they never really do know better.
Let’s be clear: what any version of the Green New Deal introduced by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Sen Ed Markey in 2019 would kill the AI era. Why? Because it is a classically socialist program by its very nature. It is a program which would seize the means of production through the central government, invoke a gigantic array of top-down command-and-control regulatory structures and utterly destroy the spirit of human initiative and innovation that leads to human flourishing and prosperity.
All the various socialist candidates quoted in the E&E piece are supported by The Sunrise Movement, a far-left activist NGO funded mainly by leftwing billionaire interests like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Soros-affiliated Open Society Policy Center. What a surprise – it’s like a who’s who of far leftwing astroturf protest funders who have been behind every U.S. protest movement since Occupy Wall Street.
The Green New Deal as proposed by AOC and Markey seven years ago involved ending discretionary air travel; heavily restricting all other travel; heavily restricting personal driving; de facto banning oil, natural gas, and coal; building a vast network of high-speed rail lines which would cost trillions of dollars and take a century or more to develop (assuming the economy didn’t enter a major depression in the meantime); and destroying power grid reliability by forcing mass adoption of wind and solar.
To this new generation of Sunrise-supported socialists, that array of destructive and frankly impossible options is now the “floor” for what really needs to be done. You just can’t make this stuff up.
“The Democrat Party – the socialists, the Marxists – have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after New York voters nominated three socialist candidates.
The speaker isn’t wrong; in fact, he’s a master of understatement. The insurgent left is not just on the rise, it is being funded by the same leftwing billionaire interests who funded the destruction of America’s coal industry, the anti-fracking movement and the effort to kill the shale revolution that has generated hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth and made the United States the world’s dominant energy powerhouse.
Any revitalization of the Green New Deal would be intentionally designed to destroy all of that and much more. Any effort to apply a renewed Green New Deal to the AI industry would be designed to destroy it, too. Because socialism at its base is never about building anything, but about destroying things, with human flourishing being its main target.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
