“A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.”
—President Biden, in an opinion article titled “My Plan for Fighting Inflation,” published in the Wall Street Journal, on May 30, 2022
This line caught our attention. [bold, links added]
After all, the typical U.S. family spends $2,060 on average per year for home utility bills, according to the most recent estimate published by EnergyStar.gov.
So Biden is promising big savings.
But it turns out the White House has been engaging in some inflation of its own.
The Facts
If that $500 figure appears familiar, it’s because you heard something similar in the president’s State of the Union address on March 1.
He said his American Rescue Plan would “cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combating climate change.”
That figure was a reference to a report published in October by the Rhodium Group, a research firm. Rhodium predicted that if Biden’s climate change policies were adopted, by 2030 “national average annual household energy costs” would be “roughly $500 lower than under current policy.”
First of all, that’s eight years from now — not a lot of help with the current inflation problem, which was the frame of Biden’s op-ed.
But the bigger problem is that “national average annual household energy costs” are not the same thing as household utility bills.
John Larsen, a Rhodium partner and principal author of the report, said the estimate includes both home energy services and the cost of driving.
The two elements are roughly equal in terms of energy costs of $4,163 — $2,126 for mobility and $2,037 for home energy. (Note that the home energy element is similar to the EnergyStar estimate.)
But most of the estimated savings, Larsen said, comes from the driving side of the equation. “Of the $495 in savings, $403 comes from mobility savings (spending less money on gasoline either because of more efficient cars or electric vehicles) and the remainder is home energy savings,” he wrote in an email.
Indeed, the report notes that, if the Biden climate plan were adopted, home electricity bills by 2030 would be between one dollar more and five dollars less than under current policy. That might pay for an extra ice cream cone over the summer.
Larsen noted that Biden, in the op-ed, referred to learning this number in a conversation with utility executives, so he did not appear to be referencing the Rhodium report.
“I can say that our numbers represent savings across all household energy expenditures and not just those associated with utility bills,” he said.
But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.
Somehow, as inflation became a hot political issue, the $500 figure that was cited in the State of the Union address appears to have morphed into a reference to utility bills.
A May 10 White House release on the “Biden-Harris Inflation Plan,” for instance, called on Congress to pass clean-energy legislation that would “save families an estimated $500 per year on their utility bills.”
Indeed, when we asked the White House for the source of the number mentioned in the Biden op-ed, we received … a link to the Rhodium report.
The Pinocchio Test
The president wrote in an opinion article on his inflation plan — presumably vetted by staff — that utility executives told him “my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500.”
But he didn’t hear that from utility executives.
And the report he is citing is not about household utility-bill savings.
Most of the claimed savings comes from the reduced cost of driving.
And the estimate is for 2030 — when he would no longer be president, even if he served a second term.
Is there any doubt the president earns Four Pinocchios?
Read more at Washington Post
Build Back Better(Try The Bitter Biter Bittern instead)one of the most meaningless political slogans since Hope & Change since we did,nt get either of them
Biden promise of reduced energy costs reminds of the UK. When they started implementing renewable energy, the rate payers were told that would result in huge savings. Since then the cost of energy has skyrocketed.
When they build Bidens Presidential Lie-Brary they will need a big room for all his Pinocchio’s
Sounds familiar, like Obama’s promise that we’d all save money on our health insurance when ObamaCare gets passed. No way will we save money from Biden’s “Green Energy” scam. Instead, like ObamaCare, costs are going to shoot up like is happening in Europe.
If the satanic A HOLES telling Biden what to do really wanted to do what they say they want to do then the first thing that they would have done would have been to improve the electric power grid. They would not have shut down pipe lines or drilling rights at least until the power grid capacity was vastly increased. Also; they would not have given all that lithium in Afghanistan to China by bailing out of Afghanistan.
As it stands now the cost of electricity will sky rocket if we have a massive switch to electric vehicles. I do not believe the power grid would survive that much pressure.. ESPECIALLY if solar and wind power were used.
So my take on this is simply that they want us to become a third world nation full of chaos and crime and poverty so that the globalist elite can force everyone into their plan which is essentially to kill most of us off.