Energy Prices in Connecticut, and the Winter of Our Discontent

We are told by a Hartford paper that energy prices are on the upswing – again: “Energy prices are rising again. Here’s what to expect in another costly winter heating season.”

The more unpleasant part of news reporting, we all know, is laying before temperamental readers the bitter truths that lie directly under their noses.

George Orwell tells us that the most difficult chore for any writer is to “see the thing that lies right under his nose.” Familiarity, along with the usual campaign season propaganda, breeds blindness.

Not all energy news can be cheery. Winter is coming, dragging along in its snowy train high and perhaps unaffordable energy prices.

To understand why energy prices are on the uptick – and have been ever since President Donald Trump grudgingly turned over to his Democrat opponent, current President Joe Biden, the reigns of office – the anxious reader must know something about the implacable law of supply and demand.

When the supply of a commodity cannot satisfy the demand for the commodity, said commodity – in the present instance, energy – becomes more expensive.

We all remember, with a mounting sense of alarm, the toilet paper crisis that afflicted all of us in 2020. Hoarders scooped up a diminishing supply of toilet paper and before you could say – “What next, a shortage of energy products?” – shelves emptied, demand rose, and the price of toilet paper soared, a near perfect instance of the iron law of supply and demand.

Whenever an imbalance of supply and demand occurs, lower commodity prices can be achieved when a marketplace balance is restored. If the demand is high and the supply is low, balance is achieved when the supply of the expensive commodity is increased, or when the demand for the commodity is proportionally reduced.

If, by way of example, you are an anxious environmentalist who wishes to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel powered cars, you may do so by driving up the price of gas so as to make it more expensive than electric for vehicles. This appears to be the strategy undertaken by the environmentally friendly Biden administration.

 "I want you to look at my eyes,” said Biden to a potential supporter on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, “I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We're going to end fossil fuel” -- by reducing supply, thus spurring sales of electric run vehicles. No more gas powered cars and trucks, no more problems.

It is important to bear in mind the above elegantly simple account of why commodity prices increase before winter arrives in New England this year, about a couple of months before nutmeggers are to march to the polls, there to re-elect to office a number of state politicians who have not shaken hands with the law of supply and demand in quite some time, if ever.

The Farmer’s Almanac, and the increased activity of squirrels scurrying around oak trees, suggest this year’s coming winter will neither be gentler nor kinder than the usual New England winter. In fact – see the headline in the above cited newspaper – it will be something of a pending crisis, unless a political solution can be found to avert ever rising energy prices.

Those of us in New England who have a tender spot in our hearts for cleaning up the world’s soiled environment are due to bear a disproportional load of discontent this winter. It will be cold; energy, the means of warming us, will be more expensive; and a box will have been created for us from which we cannot easily escape.

Not only, according to the depressing news account cited above, will the price of energy strain our budgets, but the energy supplied to replace a shortage of environmentally cleaner natural gas will be dirtier: “Natural gas accounted for 53% of electricity generated in New England in 2021, according to ISO-New England, the region’s grid operator. Nuclear energy, at 27%, is a distant second.”

President of the New England Power Generators Association Dan Dolan tells us, “As natural gas becomes costlier, other sources of energy, such as oil that’s rising less dramatically in price, will be used, he said. It’s a dirtier fuel and will throw states off their greenhouse gas emissions targets.”

And why has cleaner natural gas become more costly? See above: Its abundance has been severely reduced under Biden’s hand. But the need for less costly energy has not been reduced – especially here in winter plagued New England.

The politically induced shortage of natural gas has become the toilet paper crisis looming over the 2022 midterm elections, and those politicians responsible for the crisis are hoping that voters in New England are, like themselves, unacquainted with the iron law of supply and demand.

There is a comparable and similar iron law of politics: A stupid governed class will give rise to a stupid, but infinitely artful, government.

Fortunately, since the American Republic established in 1776 has not yet been abolished and replaced with a government of officious experts, a debilitating and quasi-aristocratic kakistocracy, people in New England may yet throw both the bums and their stupidities out.