Receiving less attention is the set of similar subsidy programs that were contained in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), one of which allocated the princely sum of $5 billion to the Departments of Energy (DOE) and Transportation (DOT) to serve as grant money to subsidize the installation of fast-charging EV charging stations around the country. In late February, Nick Pope reported at the Daily Caller that, more than two years after passage of the bill, this government program has resulted in the opening of just two locations – in Ohio and New York – that include only 8 such charging stations.

The slowness of this process should not come as a surprise to anyone, given that this subsidy program incorporates the massive bureaucracies at two federal departments. It is the nature of government agencies to find ways of slowing whatever process over which they have purview, not to speed them up. That’s not a slam on the people who staff those agencies, but a simple recognition of the realities they face in attempting to conform their actions to the complexities of the laws they are required to enforce, of which the IIJA is merely one.

This tension between the nature and complexity of western law and the need for speed the Biden White House hopes to achieve with the setting of hyper-aggressive goals and timelines related to the adoption and enforcement of its Green New Deal policies always has been and remains the central conundrum of the energy transition in the United States. The pace of the multi-faceted, $300 trillion transition is already drastically behind schedule, both in the US and across the rest of the world. There is little prospect for that pace to catch up to the desired timelines anytime in the future.

This reality is not unique to the world of electric vehicles and their associated infrastructure needs, which are massive and hugely expensive. There is also the need for dramatically expanding the electric grid, which provides power to every aspect of not only the transition but to society as a whole. The needs there were already unimaginably huge even before the rise of AI, a power hog of unprecedented proportions.

While the IRA and IIJA included incentives and subsidies that address a subset of the thousands of moving parts of an integrated energy transition, many major elements – such as the gigantic transmission expansion needed for the power grid – were left out entirely.

When the IRA was passed, I warned that the Biden White House viewed it as not a stand-alone subsidy bill, but merely as a down payment for what it viewed as a series of even larger subsidy efforts to come. If one accepts that the climate is really in an emergency condition – as the climate alarm lobby’s propaganda claims – then the passage of a perhaps unending series of debt-funded subsidy bills becomes a moral imperative, after all.

One of the big dangers there is that the momentum behind this fear-driven need for speed begins to be used as justification for the limitation or even abrogation of guaranteed rights of all stakeholders. We see this already starting to happen in states like California and Massachusetts, where Democrat Governors Gavin Newsom and Maura Healey are pushing efforts to overrule the rights of local governments to deny permits for new wind projects and other “green” energy priorities.

The slowness of federal bureaucracies only serves to heighten this sense of alarm, the worst possible motivation to justify the allocation of trillions of debt-funded dollars. It is the worst of all possible worlds, one in which policies motivated by politics promote investment decisions free markets would never create on their own and result in outcomes that do not begin to solve the problem allegedly at hand. It is, in a word, a mess.

David Blackmon is 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 views and opinions express in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

Speakers in the event’s myriad sessions invariably lay out an array of freedom-crushing and spirit-destroying plans designed to force us all to live smaller, less-mobile, less-prosperous lives, all in the name of climate change or any other global cause that can serve as a justification for the implementation of Klaus Schwab’s preferred authoritarian socialist system.

The supposed theme of this year’s WEF event was supposedly, “Restoring Trust.” That at least shows the people who style themselves as our globalist betters possess some modicum of self-awareness, given the reality of how they have destroyed any trust at all in what they’re doing among the segment of the world’s population with functioning BS detectors.

But while the event’s theme indicates some understanding of this inconvenient reality, a dig into the details betrays the same old authoritarian spirit prevailing unabated.

There was John Kerry, as usual droning on about the urgent need to stop using fossil fuels, a move that will inevitably leave billions in developing nations without access to adequate power. There was WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab, doing his best Bond villain imitation as he praised attendees for their fealty to this plan for a “great reset.”

There was U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, chatting openly with WEF President Borge Brende about the need to hasten the national sovereignty-destroying “new world order.” Truly, the more these zealots fail to achieve their goals, the more they double- and triple-down on the same awful ideas.

Another prominent speaker pushing another awful idea was IMF head Kristalina Georgieva. Ms. Georgieva appeared to have a multi-pronged assignment at this year’s festival consisting of comforting attendees that the world appears to be “poised for a soft landing,” while at the same time warning that elections are somehow a bad thing economically.

“This is going to be a very tough year, because fiscal policy has to rebuild buffers and deal with the debt that was accumulated in many countries,” Georgieva said in an interview conducted prior to arriving at the conference. “About 80 countries are going to have elections, and we know what happens with pressure on spending during election cycles.”

Then, in her address to the conference, she railed against what climate zealots refer to as “fossil fuel subsidies,” the vast majority of which is simply a tabulation of the very same business tax treatments available to every other business sector — common accounting items like deductions for depreciation and cost of goods sold. Her claim that these “subsidies” amount to $1.3 trillion globally is ludicrous on its face, but that didn’t stop her from making it.

Then, in her next breath, she advocated for the global collective cancel them and replace them with the most economy-killing idea currently in vogue — a tax on carbon.

“Put it back to support climate action. We cannot accelerate decarbonization fast enough without pricing carbon, with a predictable increase of the carbon price. It has to be USD 85 by 2030,” she asserted.

This is just pure economic sophistry. Any tax on any business engaged in the selling of any good or service will ultimately be paid by the consumer. This is just an inescapable reality of life – it is no secret. Well, apparently to anyone other than the global elites and heads of the World Bank, that is.

Georgieva is utterly dismissive of any of the little people who complain about this, though. “I am sick and tired of listening to people saying, ‘My g*d it’s so expensive, where are we going to find the money” she said, adding, “Let’s get to bringing in the money from where it hurts and putting it to where it helps.”

Where it hurts most, of course, is for the poor and lower middle classes. If that seems callous to you, well, you are not alone. But at least she puts her real views out there for all to see, and there is much utility for the rest of us hoi polloi in knowing that.

David Blackmon is 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 views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Financial Times, AP and other outlets reported that Guterres further stated, “Let’s face facts. The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels — period. We are hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open, with far too many willing to bet it all on wishful thinking, unproven technologies and silver bullet solutions.” Later in his comments, he also said, “Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral.”

The allusion to fossil fuel emissions apparently targeted United Arab Emirates COP28 president-designate Sultan al-Jaber, who is also the head of the state oil company Adnoc. Mr. al-Jaber has rejected attacks on the future license to operate of the industry itself, like those from Mr. Guterres, reasoning that the focus should be on the control of emissions instead. The UAE will play host to the 2023 COP28 conference in Dubai from November 30 through December 12, a reality that has provoked concern from the global climate alarmist movement.

Secretary Guterres has made a habit of using hyperbolic, bombastic rhetoric in his periodic attacks on the oil and gas industry, at one point in August 2022 claiming the industry was responsible for putting the world on a “highway to climate hell,” so his latest outburst is really no surprise. What is notable from this current bit of bombast, though, is the irony of a consistent proponent of an “energy transition” that schemes to displace highly energy-dense fuels like oil, gas and coal with low energy-density wind, solar and lithium-ion batteries accusing anyone else of being willing to rely on “wishful thinking, unproven technologies and silver bullet solutions.”

For decades now, since at least the early 1990s, we have been treated to claim after claim of a step-change in battery technology that would enable weather-reliant wind and solar to suddenly become 24/7 providers of energy being just around the corner. Yet, though billions have been invested in research and development of new technologies, this silver bullet remains unproven, still just around the corner, where it has supposedly resided for 30 years or more.

We have been consistently told by much of our legacy media, invariably quoting from renewables boosters, that wind energy is now extremely cheap and supposedly out-competing coal and natural gas. Yet, just Monday, the CEO of Big Wind developer Orsted, Mads Nipper, urged the British government to provide even more subsidization to offshore wind projects struggling to obtain private financing. This plea came despite the many billions of pounds in subsidies and tax breaks already provided by the UK to the wind industry, and despite the fact that Orsted itself enjoyed record profits in 2022.

Given that, perhaps UK officials should be pursuing to levy a windfall profit tax on Big Wind instead. After all, if “trading the future for 30 pieces of silver is immoral,” what then is trading the future for hundreds of billions in debt-funded subsidies?

The point here, though, is that wind energy remains exactly the kind of “unproven technology” Sec. Guterres accuses oil companies of pursuing. So, too, are the electric vehicles Guterres and other global elites promote as the “silver bullet” that can and will displace internal combustion engine (ICE) automobiles. Yet, despite 20 years of heavy subsidization, Teslas and other EVs remain pricey luxury items affordable only to the higher classes of people in most nations, including the United States and Europe.

The impulse Sec. Guterres apparently feels to ramp up the hyperbolic attacks on oil and gas in support of an energy transition that is increasingly failing to progress as he hopes is unhelpful, and frankly silly. Global leaders should be engaged in a serious debate about the future of energy and energy security, but doing that requires having serious people engaged in the discussions.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Guterres so frequently demonstrates he does not qualify as such a person.

David Blackmon is 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 views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].