Are We Affordable Yet?

Summary

• Artificial intelligence and data centers are giving leftists another avenue for controlling lives and picking pockets.
• Just as the right warned, Dominion Energy is using Virginia’s return to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to ask for higher rates.
• The taxpayer-gouging devil is in the details of an energy-efficiency rebate program.

There is a real battle in the halls of power over what will be the next global health crisis that we can use to enact all the controls we learned about from COVID-19.

It used to be a two-sided battle between gun violence and man-made climate change. Gun violence always seemed to be the logical choice. More tangible evidence, real victims’ families crying on TV, and an easier sell for a travel ban disguised as a curfew to curtail the violence.

Climate change was as difficult to define as where Greta Thunberg’s money comes from. It’s hot, but is it unusually hot? It’s raining, but hasn’t it rained before?

Then, like Golden Tempo coming from dead last to win the Kentucky Derby, here comes artificial intelligence. Add noisy data centers, Flock cameras, leftist anti-police sentiment and the Right’s anti-surveillance position, and you might just have a winning coalition.

PLUS! We can shut that damn internet down while the people are quarantined. No troublesome internet stories about ivermectin making people question our authority this time!

However, last week’s midterms happened, and the blue wave has washed the remnants of the green “griftwood” back ashore.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the top Democrat on Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, suggests Democrats will renew their push for “clean energy,” and “will demand accountability for the massive corruption wrought by Trump’s fossil-fuel donors.”

In Virginia, Dominion Energy has quietly asked the State Corporation Commission for permission to do what conservatives warned was going to happen: raise its rates to cover the cost of rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It’s a vestige of Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme designed to make commodities brokers wealthy and ratepayers poorer while not changing the climate one degree.

All under the cover of the midterm elections and the hearings on Dominion’s proposed merger with NextEra Energy. WTVR estimated that, based on the State Corporation Commission’s required calculation, a typical Dominion residential customer could see a monthly electric bill exceeding $458 by 2046 (or about $278 more than today).

Dominion says that isn’t true.

It will be only about $285 a month. Whew! (Sarcasm.)

Why the difference? Measured against the $180 monthly baseline, the State Corporation Commission’s required calculation yields an increase of more than 150%, versus roughly 57% under Dominion’s preferred plan.

Remember, these are the “Make Virginia Affordable Again” people.

Their answer seems to be to blame Donald Trump, his military operation against Iran, and hope you don’t realize that this is all their own policies bearing fruit.

One of their ideas is in the Dominion/NextEra takeover. Gov. Abigail Spanberger wants a shareholder-funded rebate program so it won’t feel like your rates have gone up.

Then there’s an energy-efficiency incentive program. As with all subsidy programs, the devil is in the qualifications. For example, have a home inspector do a “free” (meaning paid for with your taxes… rent-seeker) energy audit, and then if you do the energy-efficiency upgrades (mostly subsidized… more rent-seekers) they demand, then you will qualify for rebates (also paid for with tax dollars… bigger rent-seekers) to lower the impact of the higher costs.

Feel better?

I know, you are saying, “What do I care as long as it isn’t my money?” That’s the thing: It is. It’s taxes withheld from your paycheck, it’s the taxes your employer pays so that it can employ you, it’s the taxes you pay on most of the things you buy, and don’t forget that massive tax plan that made almost anything you paid for (including tax preparation) subject to sales taxes!

That one is waiting on the table in Richmond to return when it won’t be so politically volatile.

The governor is also proposing a new, separate subsidiary for building zero-carbon energy generation to serve large data centers. (BIG rent-seekers!) Pay our campaign contributors to build facilities that they wouldn’t build of their own volition because they would never be cost-effective on their own.

Plus, if you are a really lucky politician, they will hire Virginians for a while to pour the concrete so you can say you “created jobs.”

Well, at least it’s not illegal like the world’s oldest profession. But give Sen. Louise Lucas time. We’ll need something new to tax. (Sarcasm again.)

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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]