Seldom have a few days of energy-related news provided a clearer illustration of the stark contrasts between the crony-capitalism-based energy policies of the Biden administration and the American energy dominance policies to come during a second Trump administration as the news from the past week.
On Nov. 26, the Biden Department of Energy led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced an award of $6.6 billion to struggling electric vehicle maker Rivian in the form of a low-interest loan. The infusion of capital is designed to help the company finance a new Georgia-based plant with a production capacity of 400,000 cars per year. Rivian already operates a plant in Illinois capable of turning out 150,000 units annually.
So, what is the problem, you might ask? Well, first, Rivian — like every other U.S. EV maker other than Tesla — has consistently struggled financially. The company so badly missed its sales targets in 2023 that it was forced to discount prices and layoff workers to maintain its ability to service its existing debt load.
Second is the fact that Rivian has only managed to sell a little more than 37,000 units this year as U.S. consumer demand for EVs has stalled, at a financial loss of over $107,000 per car. This begs the question why a car company struggling to sell 50,000 units per year somehow needs the taxpayers to pony up $6.6 billion to raise its production capacity to 550,000 per year, or roughly 13 times its current annual sales.
Third is the fact that Amazon, owned in large part by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is one of Rivian’s biggest investors. Bezos is currently listed as the world’s second-richest individual by Forbes, with a net worth of more than $226 billion. If pouring another $6.6 billion into Rivian is a terrific financial idea — as DOE claims — then why haven’t Amazon and/or Bezos been eager to do that?
The answer seems fairly obvious: This really isn’t a good financial idea at all. What is really happening here is the desperation last gasp of Biden era crony capitalism, shoving those billions of IRA dollars out the door before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in and starts reining in the madness.
The day before DOE announced its award to Rivian, Trump announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on all imported goods from both Canada and Mexico if the governments in those countries do not immediately move to stop the flows of illegal immigrants and drugs across their borders with the United States. It is key to note that, when you talk about all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico, you are talking about America’s two biggest trading partners for crude oil. Canada is far and away the biggest exporter of oil into the United States, with Mexico ranking second on the list, well ahead of any OPEC nation.
The strategic objective behind announcing these tariff plans two months before being sworn into office was to give the governments of these two countries time to act quickly to slow the flows across their borders and commit to major reforms so the tariffs never have to be actually invoked. It is Trump exercising leverage in a negotiation, a skill that has made him a billionaire in his business life. It is a strategy Biden has never attempted to use related to the open borders the flow of deadly fentanyl that now kills more than 100,000 Americans annually.
Within 48 hours, Trump had held initial talks with socialist Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, reporting significant progress. Trump reported far more progress than Sheinbaum was willing to admit, another clear negotiating tactic.
By Friday, Nov. 29, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was jetting down to Mar-a-Lago to hold talks with Trump on border reforms his government is willing to make to avoid the tariffs. Again, Trump is still seven weeks away from being sworn into office.
Joe Biden remains president, at least nominally, but the days of his crony capitalist approach to energy policy are running out fast, and will soon be displaced by a Trumpian return to American energy dominance. It is a change that cannot come soon enough.
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 Arizona Free Enterprise Club released a statement on Wednesday severely criticizing the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC). The statement came after the ACC, which is charged with protecting Arizonans from a non-competitive energy industry, voted to abdicate its duty by allowing formulaic rates that increase automatically year over year, as opposed to every increase being subject to public scrutiny and requiring approval.
The vote on Tuesday was carried 3-2 with commissioners Anna Tovar and Lea Márquez Peterson dissenting. According to the ACC, its policy statement “allows regulated utilities to propose formula rates in future rate cases. Under this approach, the ACC reviews and accepts as the rate a formula for calculating the utility’s cost of service, including clear definitions of inputs to that formula and a process for updating rates every year as the utility’s costs change.”
The commission claimed, “Formula rates will still be monitored closely to ensure that the utility does not over-earn relative to the cost of service for providing service (plus a reasonable return on invested capital), while continuing to provide service safely and reliably.”
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club responded in a statement saying:
“Following contentious double digit rate hikes being approved and ESG Resource Plans committed to going ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 being rubber stamped, the Commission has rushed through approving new rules masquerading as a mere ‘policy statement’ that could insulate utilities and the Commission from having to face ratepayers in future rate cases. The ‘policy statement’ would depart from traditional rate making and pursue ‘formula based rates’ offloading risk from investors to ratepayers and baking in automatic rate increases with little transparency or opportunity for ratepayer engagement.
“The only support for this ‘policy statement’ came from the utilities themselves. The Commission is charged to protect ratepayers by regulating the utilities, not the other way around. The Commission should pump the brakes, not rush through major rulemaking decisions in a lame duck session.
“The Arizona Free Enterprise Club is committed to protecting ratepayers, ensuring affordable and reliable energy in Arizona. We will continue to work to ensure utilities will not be able to force their captive ratepayers to foot the bill, especially through automatic rate hikes, for their costly goal to go ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 by shuttering reliable sources of energy generation to build out expensive and unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage projects.”
Attorney Dan Pozesfsky of Arizona’s Residential Utility Consumer Office (RUCO), expressed a similar view according to 12News saying, “Trying to implement formula rates through a policy statement rather than through rules is inappropriate, illegal and in this case denies due process.”
The outlet reported that the ACC, ignoring its own plans for the vote, rushed to schedule it noting that in a previous meeting Commission Chairman Jim O’Connor had told stakeholders, “Give us feedback. Bring us guardrails.” He added, “I eagerly look forward to that kind of input at our next workshop.” However, no workshop occurred and no published legal opinions were issued.
Diane Brown of the nonprofit Arizona PIRG Education Fund stressed that the vote was conducted with critical questions about the scheme remaining unanswered. She said, “This is precisely to me why it was so important to have the legal memo that this Commission said they would get. While there are statements that there will be increased transparency, I’m not seeing evidence of that. It is troubling to me that we haven’t heard from the ALJ (administrative law judge). We have not heard from Staff.”
Many Arizona energy consumers are about to see some savings in their bills in time for the holidays.
This month, the Southwest Gas Corporation sent a notice to the Arizona Corporation Commission about a rate decrease to consumers effective at the start of October.
The statement from Doran A. Miller, a Regulator Manager, said, “Pursuant to Decision Nos 74595 and 79038, Southwest Gas is providing notice that the Gas Cost Balancing Account rate will decrease from $0.30911 per therm to $0.00 per therm effective October 1, 2024. This results in a decrease of approximately $7 per month for the average single-family residential customer.”
In an exclusive comment to AZ Free News, Republican Commissioner Kevin Thompson responded to the notice from Southwest Gas, saying, “Any significant savings for the ratepayer should be welcomed, particularly in this economy. The cost of natural gas fuel is required to be passed along to ratepayers as a monthly surcharge that the Commission regularly reviews to make sure customers are paying the actual cost. This helps ensure utilities don’t over collect or earn a profit on this necessary resource.”
Thompson added, “As volatility in domestic and international markets have subsided, and the cost of natural gas dramatically decreases, most Southwest Gas customers will see a noticeable decrease in their monthly gas bill beginning in October.”
Earlier this year, the Corporation Commission shared a report from WalletHub, which showed that Arizona had the second-lowest energy cost out of the 50 states in the North American union with a $400 bill.
According to the Corporation Commission, there were a handful of factors separating Arizona from other states:
“Diverse generation sources – Arizona relies on a mix of generation sources, from nuclear, natural gas, hydropower, renewables, and battery storage.
“Self-Sufficiency – Arizona is not dependent on imported power. We tap into the market if needed, but our utilities’ focus is providing Integrated Resource Plans to guarantee future readiness. The Commission diligently oversees upgrades and construction.
“Proactive maintenance to ensure reliability – The Commission prioritizes daily maintenance and line work leading up to the summer to ensure the grid is ready for the extreme heat and high load.”
Republican Commissioner Lea Marquez Peterson reacted to the report from WalletHub, writing, “The data released in the report reflects the priorities of our Commission – reliable energy at the most affordable rates. I’m proud of the service and affordable rates we work hard to provide to ratepayers throughout the state.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The catalog of Vice President Kamala Harris’s history on energy policy is as thin as the listing of her accomplishments as President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” which is to say it is bereft of anything of real substance.
But the queen of word salads and newly minted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has publicly endorsed many of her party’s most radical and disastrous energy-related ideas while serving in various elected offices — both in her energy basket-case home state of California and in Washington, D.C.
What Harris’s statements add up to is a potential disaster for America’s future energy security.
“The vice president’s approach to energy has been sophomorically dilettantish, grasping not only at shiny things such as AOC’sGreen New Deal but also at the straws Americans use to suck down the drinks they need when she starts talking like a Valley Girl,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at Institute for Energy Research, told me in an email this week. “To be honest, she’s no worse than many of her former Senate colleagues who have helped cheer on rising energy costs and the fleeing American jobs that accompany them. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of reliable and affordable domestic energy, good skilled jobs or the national security implications of domestically produced energy, but maybe she will go back to school on the matter. No doubt on her electric school bus.”
During her first run for the Senate in 2016, Harris said she would love to expand her state’s economically ruinous cap-and-trade program to the national level. She also endorsed then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s harebrained scheme to ban plastic straws as a means of fighting climate change.
Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told me proposals like that one would lead during a Harris presidency to the “Californication of the entire U.S. energy policy.” “Historically,” he added, “the transition of power from a president to a vice president is designed to signal continuity. This won’t be the case, because a Harris administration will be much worse.”
But how much worse could it be than the set of Biden policies that Harris has roundly endorsed over the last three and a half years? How much worse can it be than having laughed through a presidency that:
As Biden’s successor for the nomination, Harris becomes the proud owner of all these policies, and more.
But Harris’ history shows it could indeed get worse. Much worse, in fact.
While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.
Consider also that while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It is not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal and climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.
As I have detailed here many times, every element of climate-alarm-based energy policies adopted by the Biden administration will inevitably lead the United State to become increasingly reliant on China for its energy needs, in the process decimating our country’s energy security. By her own words and actions, Harris has made it abundantly clear she wants to shift the process of getting there into a higher gear.
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.
President Joe Biden’s time in the White House is mercifully coming to an end. He is now officially a lame duck with six months to go.
Biden was a victim here of a corrupt Democratic machine that — along with a complicit media — thought they could pull off a grand election-year deceit, despite his failing cognitive abilities. The Democratic establishment and a compliant media convinced millions of primary voters that Biden was of sound mind and ready to serve four more years. This lust for power put America in danger.
How could they be so unpatriotic?
So, where will Biden stand in the history books? He was not a failed president because of his declining cognitive abilities. It was his policies that wrecked America.
It is hard to point to a single policy that he got right. On the economy, he was catastrophically bad.
The trillions of dollars of debt he rung up bought nothing. He sent inflation to the highest levels in almost forty years.
The average family lost $2,000 of income after inflation during his reign. More people died of COVID during his presidency than Trump’s — despite the availability of the vaccine.
Interest rates rose. Biden declared war on American energy. He put America back into the Paris Climate Accord—and the rest of the world went on using more fossil fuels than ever. By impeding U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines he played into the hands of our enemies — China and Iran.
Gas prices rose. Small business confidence sagged. Poverty rates rose.
Then there was the sheer incompetence. The bungled Afghanistan withdrawal was a national security disaster. The border became a broken dam with millions seeking to illegally enter the country. The government spent $7.5 billion on electric vehicle chargers and only a handful got built.
Biden gave away hundreds of billions of dollars for an illegal and immoral student loan forgiveness program. He put regulators in charge of key agencies even though — or because — they hate business. A majority of his appointees had no business experience. It showed.
When he departs the White House in the months ahead he will leave the nation poorer, weaker, more divided, more in debt, more vulnerable, and less respected than when he entered office.
This was a man who pledged to unite the country and did just the opposite. He deserves to go down in history as one of the five worst presidents of the 20th and 21st century.
Here is my list starting with the worst: 1) Woodrow Wilson; 2) Herbert Hoover: 3) Jimmy Carter; 4) Joe Biden; 5) Barack Obama.
Now the Democrats want to run Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on board with every Biden policy and helped oversee the worst border catastrophe in modern history.
Just when you thought things could not get any worse.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
