With inflation accelerating to an explosive 9.1% in June as President Joe Biden heads to Saudi Arabia, hat in hand, to beg for more oil, we are all unfortunately paying the literal price for punishing environmental regulations.
Around the globe, similar events are receiving less attention but carry great importance. Consider the recent uprisings in both Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.
They have a common denominator: they are driven by the green movement, whose advocates profess to be clean but in fact rely on a lot of dirty tricks.
On the island nation of Sri Lanka, the leadership has promised to resign after the people rose up against their green failure. Just over a year ago, those leaders mandated farmers switch from effective fertilizers to all organic in an effort to cut nitrogen. The motivation for the switch didn’t have anything to do with agriculture and everything to do with economic environmentalism. With no other option but to rely on loans, leaders felt they couldn’t afford to offend financiers who now placed hefty green regulations on that money. Nitrogen in fertilizer, a critical part of growing food, was outlawed. The result? Crop production fell, store shelves emptied and now the small country has descended into chaos.
At nearly the same time, farmers 5,000 miles away were gearing up for their own revolt.
Eco-rule makers in the Netherlands imposed the same anti-nitrogen rules, and farmers stood up. Their weeks-long protest is ongoing because the men and women who grow food in the European nation know what Sri Lanka has already learned — the Green Agenda will harm food supplies and destroy their farms.
The pattern in both countries is simple: first, the green movement identifies an element critical to an industry, and then they outlaw it. The process is executed by administrative fiat utilizing unaccountable bureaucrats who do not have to face voters or pay a political price for strangling a critical industry.
Side note: it’s important to note that these environmental regulations are very selective in targeting which industries to strangle. Aviation, private yachts, along with solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing, all create the emissions singled-out by eco-activists, but those areas face little to no scrutiny. In fact, it seems the only time environmental bureaucrats and their activist enablers target an industry is when it is politically convenient.
We need to recognize this pattern before our country heads down the same misguided path.
Despite the recent slap down of the administrative state from the Supreme Court in the West Virginia vs. EPA ruling, the Biden administration is pressing forward with rules to come after your car. Putting aside the fact that neither President Biden nor a single member of his cabinet owns an electric vehicle, we see the pattern. At the state level, we see eco-politicians utilize their army of regulators to target energy producers because apparently, we’re not paying enough for gas at the pump.
The Green Agenda has perfected the art of the targeted attack from unaccountable bureaucrats. Sri Lanka and the Netherlands are proof of the disastrous results. With massive inflation already here, let’s not let our country become next on the chopping block.
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future, a non-profit that advocates for America’s energy workers. You can find him on Twitter @larrybehrens or you can email him: larry@powerthefuture.com