Tucker: Energy inflation is a direct result of White House policies
Fox News host provides insight on U.S. energy policies as gas prices rise on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Pretty much everybody in America feels awful about what is happening right now to average Ukrainians. They didn't ask for this war and they're really suffering so your heart goes out. You feel compassion for tragedy no matter where it is, whether it's a landslide in Sri Lanka or a war in Ukraine.
So, you feel compassionate. On the other hand, you may have, at some point over the last month, asked yourself: "Why is the invasion of a faraway eastern European country suddenly the single biggest thing that ever happened in our country, in America?" It's kind of strange, especially given everything we've got going on in the U.S. right now and what is it with Biden's response to this war? That's weird, too.
Biden keeps telling us these energy sanctions are going to crush Putin, but they haven't. That's clearly not true. Putin's fine. The ruble has almost completely recovered since the day Russia invaded. So much for destroying the Russian economy and getting the Russian military to withdraw from Ukraine and yet we in the U.S. are paying higher and higher gas prices thanks to these sanctions.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a cabinet meeting via video conference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
So, Biden is not hurting Vladimir Putin. Biden is hurting American citizens. Why? What exactly is this about? Well, the first thing you should know and never forget is that nothing changes a society faster than a war, even a war in another country. If you want to reorder a society, you're going to need a major crisis in order to do it. The democratic process is not going to work for you. The democratic process will never get you to total transformation because voters almost never want systemic change. They prefer incremental improvement and that's why they tend to elect the very same people to office year after year.
They do that because radicalism—big change—scares them. They are not looking —and they are never looking —for massive, abrupt changes to the way they live. So again, if you want a revolution, you're going to need some kind of emergency to justify it.
Let's say, for example, that you wanted to change a country's 250-year-old system of voting in order to make that system much more vulnerable to mass election fraud, which you would commit. How would you go about doing something like that? You couldn't do it by referendum. No. You might need to declare a public health emergency and then institute vote-by-mail in the name of fighting a pandemic. You should try that because that might work.
Or, for another example, how would you go about taking full control over an economy built on fossil fuels? Well, you'd first have to break the existing economy because if you gave people a choice over how to power their vehicles, homes and businesses, not many of them would choose windmills. No, they'd go with what they have, which is oil and gas. So, you'd have to take that choice away from them. You couldn't let them choose and you couldn't do this by democratic means because no legislature would ever vote for a change like that because they know voters don't want it.
So instead, you might use a war underway across the world to declare an energy shortage in your country and then make fossil fuels unaffordable for the average person and that way, people would have no choice but to switch over to the new system, which, not incidentally, you and your friends and your donors would control.
So that'd be one way, maybe the only way to get a Green New Deal, without having to get it through Congress because it never would go through Congress. Hmm. Do you think that's what's happening here? You'd hate to think so. You wouldn't want to think that your government would intentionally exacerbate the suffering of millions of Ukrainian civilians in order to take over America's energy grid, but that seems to be exactly what is happening right now and we know this because the administration has essentially told us up.
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As of tonight, the vast majority of electricity that we use in this country for everything but 80% of our electricity comes from just three sources—natural gas, coal and nuclear energy. The Biden administration has pledged to get rid of all three of these things. There will be no more coal plants, Joe Biden said during the campaign.
John Kerry, our climate czar, agreed. No more coal plants operating in the United States by 2030, he said—no clue in how we're going to power the cities that are totally dependent on coal fired electricity. Here's Joe Biden explaining that electricity for your home, your city, electric cars, all of it pretty darn soon is going to come from heat pumps and solar panels.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Under my plan, which is before the Congress now, we can take advantage of the next generation of electric vehicles that a typical driver will save about $80 a month from not having to pay gas at the pump. If your home is powered by safer, cheaper, cleaner electricity like solar or heat pumps, you can save about $500 a month on average.
President Biden speaks about status of the country's fight against COVID-19 in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Wednesday, March 30, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
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Wow. So, we just need to completely change the way that you power your home. We're going to get rid of coal, gas and nuclear energy and you can save on average some more $500 a month. You just have to power your house with solar panels. It's simple. So, where will these solar panels come from? Well, as it happens, they will come from China. We can be certain of that because the Chinese make more than 80% of all the world's solar panels, which is to say, all of them.
So, we're going to be even more reliant, far more reliant on Chinese manufacturing than we already are. Offend the Chinese and no more electricity. So that's a risk, considering they despise us, but it's going to be worth it, Joe Biden says. We're going to upend the entire U.S. economy and make ourselves completely dependent on a country that seeks to displace us. But you're going to save 500 bucks a month on your energy bill - $500 a month, not a small thing, but it's not actually true.
Shortly after Biden spoke, in a ritual we're becoming very used to, the White House issued a clarification. It turns out that Biden meant to say—and if he wasn't senile, would have said—that you're going to save $500 a year. So, that's one-twelfth of what he promised if we turn over our electricity production to China. So, $500 a year, not a month. So, he was only off by about $5,500 bucks. On the other hand, $500 a year is still something. It's enough to fill your SUV maybe three times.
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PHIL SHUMAN, KTTV REPORTER: It costs tech entrepreneur Mo Hassan $140 every two days to fill up his 2021 Cadillac Escalade when he cruises the streets of Southern California. … Prices vary depending on where you buy. At many stations, it's still way above $7 a gallon. Still the highest in the country, though, we've had a dip of a few cents in recent days. Hardly a game changer.
Oh, it's just $7.50 a gallon, not a big deal. It's always been this way. Oh no, it hasn't. Pretty soon they'll tell you that, but we just want to say, for the record, that that's not true. In 2018, which is not ancient history, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the state of California, most expensive for the country, was $3.60 per gallon. Now it's double that. How did that happen? Does it have anything to do with the current president's pledge to "phase out fossil fuels forever?"
Gasoline is a fossil fuel. He wants to phase it out. It shouldn't surprise you that it's more expensive. Or could it be Vladimir Putin's fault? Did Putin do it? Here's what PragerU found out when they spoke to people who are actually buying gas.
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Americans are experiencing the highest gas prices since the 2008 financial crisis, with the national gas price average reaching more than $4 per gallon. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
WILL WITT: Why do you think that the gas prices have gotten so high?
WOMAN: Well, I think it's to do with maybe all the sanctions on Russia, part of it.
MAN: The United States stopped importing Russian oil or something to that effect. I don't know if I have the details are quite right, but that's what I think.
WILL WITT: Part of that is definitely true. A lot of it is somewhat because America isn’t energy independent. We don't produce a lot of our own energy anymore, but Russian oil is only about 3 % of the oil that America gets. The price of gas was going up before Russian oil.
WILL WITT: If we had our own energy, our own oil production...
MAN: It would be a lot...easier and a lot more self-reliant. A lot more reliable, too. Yeah, that's a very interesting thought. I've not thought about that before.
That's a pretty interesting response. People know it has something to do with Russia. They've been told it's all Putin's fault. The kind, you know, there's a connection between the sanctions against Russian energy and our own rising gas prices. What they don't understand is it's much deeper than that. They're blaming Russia. So, there's a reason the people pushing this war love this war. It's an all-purpose excuse for the disasters they have made, the disasters that benefit them, but if you take a look at the numbers you see, there's a lot more going on here than just a war in Ukraine, no matter what they tell you.
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In February of 2021, a year after the corona pandemic began and a month after Donald Trump left office, the average price of gas the United States was about $2.50. Since then, the price of gas has continued to rise. By last November, months before the Russian invasion, the per gallon average was $3.39. So, no, the war in Ukraine did not do this. Putin did not do this. Putin didn't, by the way, sanction himself.
Energy inflation is a direct and intended result of White House policies. The whole point of these policies is to make it impossible for you to use fossil fuels because you can't afford it and then substitute those fossil fuels, which you could afford with new green energy that you have no choice but to use. They're saying that essentially out loud. Here's the Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi. She explained that even though we probably could fix this problem by producing more of our own energy in the United States, which we own, which is the root of our prosperity, we're not going to do that because cheap oil would devalue her family's investments in renewable. Sorry, we didn't mean to say that. We mean cheap oil would destroy the planet.
NANCY PELOSI: We cannot allow the fossil fuel industry to use this as an excuse to reverse everything we're doing to save the planet.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks to reporters during her weekly press conference at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
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Did you read that? "Everything we're doing to save the planet." Now these are the people who preside over the dirtiest state out of 50—California — who don't go outside except in their own walled gardens, who know nothing about the environment, who couldn't care less about the environment, who are trashing the environment and who were raising your gas prices in the name of the environment, so their families grow rich.
"We can't stop what we're doing." She's just saying it, right up there in English, "We're doing this," which they are. So, this is a lady with huge estates all over the country who brags that she has a $30,000 freezer telling you, you're just have to suck it up and be poor for the planet she doesn't care about at all.
So, who's benefiting from this? China's benefiting from it. We already told you that. That's obvious, but the Biden administration's donors are benefiting from it, too, and one of them is now the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm. Thanks to reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, which we are grateful for, we know that Jennifer Granholm held millions of dollars in stock in so-called green energy companies while she was serving as the secretary of energy.
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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Nov. 23, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
So, you hold energy stocks while you're the secretary of energy? Hmm, where's the Justice Department? Jennifer Granholm did not sell these equities, even after she took office. Is that a conflict of interest? Of course, it is. It's criminal, but Jennifer Granholm didn't seem bothered. She knew she would never be charged with anything. The Biden administration isn't bothered, either. This is the whole game. Make your donors rich by saving the planet. Jennifer Granholm is still running the Energy Department. Here she is explaining that her stock portfolio would really benefit if we "decarbonized the fossil fuel industry."
JENNIFER GRANHOLM: We want to invest in renewables. We want to invest in the technologies that decarbonize the fossil fuel industry. To become energy independent with clean energy is the medium to long-term strategy.
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It does kind of answer one enduring mystery. Why would they put someone in as secretary of energy who knows nothing about energy, never been in the energy business, has no idea what the energy grid is, has no clue how your iPhone is charged overnight—none at all—and yet she's the secretary of energy?
Oh, because it's an investment scam and they're all in on it. Check investments right now in renewable energies since the manmade energy crisis that Joe Biden and his sanctions set off and you'll see it's quite a robust market right now. Who's benefiting from that? Right, people like Jennifer Granholm. She wants to force you to subsidize her investments. That's the medium to long-term strategy and no crisis in the last decade has given them better cover than the invasion of the client state of Ukraine that Jennifer Granholm can't even find on a map. There's a reason they're focused on Ukraine and it's to give you the Green New Deal, whether you want it or not.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening monologue on the April 1, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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