Just earlier this week, our newspaper published a report from the Empire Center for Public Policy in New York that clearly linked higher electric prices to the draconian extremist policies implemented by liberal politicians in blue states.
The proof was clear as day. Liberal states such as New York and California that implemented these far-out policies, including closing down gas and nuclear plants, saw increases of about 65%, while red states that took more reasonable, all-of-the-above approaches, were up far less at around 35%.
We noted that the Democrats had been touting talking points that the increases were due to the war in Iran or the need to support the growth of the artificial intelligence industry.
But those things are relatively new. The increases we have seen stemmed from 2019, when the climate change proposals came into play.
And now we see the liberally slanted Associated Press regurgitating Democratic talking points. Rather than the AP pointing to the Empire Center, which shows it was the blue-state policies that caused the increases, they instead restated the disproven Democratic nonsense, such as “analysts cite multiple reasons for higher prices, among them, increased demand from data centers and the price of natural gas, which often is used to generate electricity.”
Well, the price of natural gas is obviously going to go up in those blue states when blue-state legislators stopped the flow of the gas.
Too bad the AP didn’t have the objectivity to add that line.
The AP article talks about what’s being done in California and New York with their cap-and-trade policies, but doesn’t add that these policies increased costs. Instead, they lauded them as efforts to clean the environment. “In California, cap-and-invest is crucial to achieving goals that include reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. The state has used proceeds from cap-and-invest to direct billions of dollars to things like public transit and clean-vehicle incentives.”
Perhaps they mean the $100 billion bullet train to nowhere.
The liberal AP tries to make it sound like cap-and-trade policies have been wonderful for the environment, but as stated earlier, the carbon footprint in some of these states had actually gone up. All the cap-and-trade programs have done is increase the prices, which the AP fails to connect.