American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2024 - 37

Election2024: Industry Analysis
Q: According to a poll this summer by the Associated Press and NORC
Center for Public Affairs Research, " more than half of Americans are
unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change. " Even
many of those who say they are willing to pay more will cap their upper
limits. Given that most Americans are unwilling to pay much more than
they already are for transportation fuel, electricity and the scores of products
for which crude oil, natural gas and liquids are necessary components, how
should a (Harris/Trump) administration frame the sacrifices that would
likely emanate from policies to further reduce GHG emissions?
ClearView: Our data set, which goes back to
former President Reagan's first term in 1981,
shows a meaningful (-0.51) inverse correlation
between real pump prices and presidential approval
ratings. Correlation does not imply causation, but
you don't need to be a stats wizard or a political
science professor to appreciate how weekly contact
with fuel costs can shape voters' sense of economic
well-being.
H
End-users could face higher costs from most climate
change mitigation policies whether those policies
impose explicit surcharges on fossil fuels or implicitly
pass through the impact of regulation. And even if
federal policymakers can monetize the prevention of
fires, droughts and floods by calculating a " social
cost of GHGs " that quantifies per-ton savings from
avoided emissions, drivers can't use those social cost
savings to pay for fuel premia at the service island.
In emphasizing the job creation and national security
benefits of their clean industrial policy, the Biden administration
and the Harris campaign seem to be
trying to manage this challenge. The administration
structured its programs-as a matter of executive
branch policy and within the Inflation Reduction
Act-to encourage investments that can boost disadvantaged
communities, and Harris has indicated that
she intends to continue these distributional priorities.
Ironically, although a carbon tax may transparently
convey the end-user impacts of climate policies, the
Biden administration has pledged not to increase
taxes on households earning less than $400,000 per
year. That seems to have ruled out a carbon tax-if
not a methane fee-during the Biden term. Harris
has made the same pledge, which means voters may
not be able to see transparent, direct costs of her administration's
climate policies, either.
AEI: The funny thing about that polling is that
those same Americans do not realize that their
overseers already force them to pay thousands
of dollars each year to subsidize solar, wind, batteries,
electric vehicles and more. If they were aware of
how much they already were paying for these things-
more than any society in the world-they would ask
for refunds. Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
shows that Biden-Harris policies have imposed
a roughly 40% energy tax on Americans.
Americans are waking up to the fact that the $2,500
in annual savings under the previous Trump administration
has been replaced with a $5,000 annual increase
in everything thanks to the " Green New Deal " policies
of the Biden-Harris administration. President Trump
should state clearly that a President Harris would
continue implementing programs to increase gas and
energy prices on purpose-policies that will reduce
economic growth and prosperity domestically, and
will reward other countries from which we will be
forced to import an ever-increasing amount of goods.
The cherry on top is that these policies increase
global GHG emissions by rewarding coal-based economies
such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam,
which pollute with abandon because they lack the advanced
pollution control technologies of American
coal. The sacrifices those policies impose on the American
people against their will are the end-goal of the
climate alarmist movement, not a mere side effect.
Keep in mind that California, New York, New
T
Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and other " blue "
states control the vast majority of the country's
massive imports (and modest exports). In other words,
the more goods we import, the more influential those
blue states become, along with China and the other
countries from which we import goods.
It is no coincidence that Harris-Walz want to
impose California's energy restrictions nationwide:
Government-controlled energy begets economywide
control. Harris' radical leftist ideology aims to sentence
domestic use of fossil fuels to death by a thousand
OCTOBER 2024 37
American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2024

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