The end of the presidential administration of befuddled old Joe Biden can't come soon enough.
To be fair, these days, we can't really lay much blame at the feet of poor old Joe. Oh, his actions in the past, from his first days in the Senate to his terms as Barack Obama's second banana, include plenty of things for which he should be called to account. But as his embarrassing debate performance against former President Donald Trump and his subsequent withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race have made obvious to the point where even Democrats can't deny it any longer, he's no longer competent. Joe Biden, let's be honest, has very little idea what's going on, except when it's time for his afternoon pre-nap pudding cup.
His administration, though, is planning to keep wasting taxpayer funds until the very last dog is hung.
The latest? $4.3 billion — your money and mine — will be disbursed to fund "climate projects."
With its July 22 announcement that it is disbursing $4.3 billion in taxpayer-funded grants for an assortment of climate projects around the country, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) secured the loot for grateful recipients before President Joe Biden leaves office in January.
The money will go to 25 projects across 30 states (some will cross state borders) and will target greenhouse gas emissions from “transportation, electric power, commercial and residential buildings, industry, agriculture/natural and working lands, and waste and materials management,” the EPA said in a press release. Funds for the grants were provided from the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Program anchored in the 2022 misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate law.
We may very well ask why an act titled the "Inflation Reduction Act" involves throwing billions of fiat dollars at projects targeting greenhouse gas emissions. There is indeed nothing in the Inflation Reduction Act that has anything to do with reducing inflation, but then, straining at gnats and swallowing camels seems to be a prerequisite for entering government service these days.
Here are a few tidbits of the projects to be funded.
Among the projects receiving the federal largesse are statewide decarbonization initiatives in Pennsylvania targeting cement, asphalt, and other materials; $307 million for measures in Nebraska to promote “climate smart” practices ostensibly to reduce emissions from agriculture and waste; and an effort to install EV chargers for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles along a highway on the East Coast.
An air management district in Southern California will receive $500 million to help decarbonize the region’s transportation and freight sectors, including at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. EPA’s grants to the region will provide funding for “electric charging equipment, zero-emission freight vehicles and conversion of cargo handling equipment to lower emissions.”
Not more EV charger promises! Haven't we seen enough of those already?
See Related: Where Are Those 500,000 EV Chargers Biden Promised? Turns Out They've Been Delayed by… DEI Requirements.
And look at all that money for decarbonizing everything from agriculture to transportation — with no mention whatsoever as to where all the required increases in electrical generation will come from, probably because there won't be any. These grants will be issued, spent, and disappear; certain pockets (let's say this softly) will be lined, and eventually, some of these "initiatives" will end, and the organizations charged with implementing them will quietly go out of business and disappear.
This is not a prediction that I make lightly; there is ample precedent.
See Related: This Just in: Carbon Dioxide Is Good for Plants
But wait! There's more!
The EPA climate grants continue the Biden administration’s practice of throwing taxpayer money at the transition to EVs. And its timing would appear to be a bit off. Unsold EVs continue to pile up on dealer lots across the country, with Ford and GM cutting production of the vehicles, and Ford losing over $100,000 on the sale of each new EV.
That's right: The Biden administration plans to toss yet more of our hard-earned money at subsidizing electric vehicles that few people want. Were the market left to itself, the EV production would stabilize at a reasonable level, with purchases by people who can afford the pricey battery-mobiles and for whom they make sense — but the government can't seem to keep from diddling around with markets, and that diddling is, again, funded by our tax dollars.
In summary, the Biden administration, and by that I mean the young wokesters who likely make up much of the administration's rank-and-file, plan to exit stage left (hah) but not before throwing billions more taxpayer dollars into solutions that already are not working, to try to find solutions that are desperately seeking a problem. More waste, more money poured down cronyism ratholes, and we are stuck with the tab.
In his benchmark book "The Grapes of Wrath," author John Steinbeck described a conversation between two Depression-era farmers that I will paraphrase appropriately:
...when I was a kid my ol’ man give me a haltered heifer an’ says take her down an’ git her serviced. An’ the fella says, I done it, an’ ever’ time since then when I hear a (government) man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s gettin’ screwed.
I know the answer to that. It's all of us.
