It’s no secret that the Biden Administration is a disaster for the American energy economy.
In case you don’t have enough government acronyms in your life, or if you just love alphabet soup, here are two often overlooked government / quasi-government entities that are now front and center when it comes to keeping our lights on and our economy rolling.
“NERC” stands for North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
“NEPA” stands for National Environmental Policy Act.
The Biden Administration is mishandling both of them.
David Wojick posted this to CFACT.org:
“The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC for short (rhymes with jerk), recently released a report warning of likely blackouts across much of America this summer… My question is, instead of reporting this pending calamity, why is NERC not preventing it? What is not reported, and seems to be little known, is that NERC is a quasi-regulatory federal agency whose mission is to maintain reliability.”
David asks an excellent question which he goes on to answer. The Biden Administration’s adherence to climate dogma appears to be preventing NERC from doing its job and keeping the electric grid safe.
Similarly the ideologues who control the Biden Administration are taking giant steps backward toward using NEPA not to legitimately safeguard nature, but as a pretext for the anti-development crowd to thwart progress. Ironically, even “renewable” energy projects!
CFACT senior policy analyst Bonner Cohen explains at CFACT.org:
“The NEPA process was notorious for its red tape and litigation, which put many projects on hold indefinitely and led to the abandonment of numerous others. Over the decades, environmental groups became skillful at using NEPA to scuttle highways, bridges, mining operations, oil and gas pipelines, oil and gas wells, and anything else not to their liking. Large infrastructure projects require significant upfront capital investments, and the prospect of drawn-out litigation and bureaucratic foot-dragging common to NEPA gave investors an incentive to put their money elsewhere.”
Now the Left is faced with their own pet projects running right smack into their own pet delaying tactics. As Bonner further explains:
“Local resistance to wind turbines shooting hundreds of feet into the air and to putting thousands of solar panels with backup batteries on rural lands is picking up steam across the U.S.”
NEPA is just the law to stand in their way.
Free markets are efficient. Bureaucracy is anything but.
Under Joe Biden American bureaucracy is failing to perform important tasks, such as keeping the electric grid reliable, while performing roles Congress never intended, such as blocking economic projects to no meaningful environmental benefit.