Impact Of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act – ‘Clean Energy Ghost Towns’

MRCTV cited CEI’s expert on Inflation Reduction Act

Ben Lieberman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently testified before the House Oversight Committee on the impacts of the Biden administration’s  ‘Inflation Reduction Act’  – specifically as to the billions of dollars spent on “green energy.”

Lieberman says, its impact will likely be remembered as another congressional energy “boondoggle.”

“Sure you can create a lot of jobs if you throw a lot of money at just about anything, especially lots of federal dollars. The question is, do these alternative energy sources have any lasting power? The American people are not pounding the table demanding higher utility bills and more expensive transportation. And so these alternatives need to become cost competitive to have any real future,” Lieberman testified.

“And I just don’t see that happening with most of the alternatives being subsidized right now. And I would say there’s a long history with this and it doesn’t bode very well. Congress is not nearly as good as it thinks it is in figuring out what the next big thing in energy is. It’s been trying this since the oil shocks of the 1970s, but there’s been a lot of boondoggles on the way along the way. Not really much in the way of alternative energy success stories that we can point to.

One example I could mention from when I was a staffer ten years ago, when the next big thing was cellulosic biofuels. I don’t know if you remember cellulosic, but there were all sorts of tax credits and other incentives adding up to dollars per gallon, very similar to what you see for other things in the Inflation Reduction Act. The facilities were built and it turned into a boondoggle, including a lot of communities that felt cheated because the permanent jobs never materialized. I fear that if we come back in five years, we’ll be talking about a number of clean energy ghost towns as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act.”

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