Soon enough, they’ll wonder why the same policies have failed once again to better their circumstances.
New Jersey’s voters have spoken, and they’re about to get what they voted for — “good and hard,” as H. L. Mencken put it.
The Garden State’s governor-elect, Mikie Sherrill, recently revealed her picks for her transition team — a litany of names prominent in their fields but many of whom are not well known outside them. Some names will ring a bell if only because they filled prominent roles in the Biden administration. Among them is Joe Biden’s secretary of energy, onetime Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who has been tapped to co-chair a panel devoted to reviewing New Jersey’s spiking energy costs.
New Jersey residents’ rapidly rising utility bills were an issue during the campaign. Pollsters found that, while the state’s voters were willing to spread the blame around for their new monthly burdens, there was an emerging consensus around a solution to their woes: the need for more power generation. Last month, Fairleigh Dickinson University pollsters found, for example, that both Republicans and Democrats in the Garden State now favor the construction of new natural gas plants. FDU pollster Dan Cassino said that consensus will be a tricky balancing act for Democratic lawmakers, as it pits the environmentalist lobby against everyone else. We should not expect the new governor’s administration to side with the public.
For her part, Sherrill’s energy plan consists of forcing the nonprofit electric-grid operator PJM Interconnection to “accelerate the development of cheaper and cleaner energy sources and connect new power generation to our grid immediately.” She’ll pair that hectoring with a declaration of a state of emergency, which will allow the governor to freeze electricity costs in the state for one year.
If Sherrill’s plan is to default to gimmicks designed only to postpone the state’s reckoning with its bad bets on renewable energy projects at the expense of more reliable, on-demand power sources, Granholm is likely to reinforce those instincts. It was the “volatility associated with fossil fuels” that she associated with rising energy costs as early as November 2021 — something she didn’t exactly appear to be distressed by. When asked if the administration she served might help reduce the cost burden on power consumers by signaling its interest in increasing fossil fuel production, Granholm laughed. “That is hilarious,” she said. “Would that I had a magic wand on this.”
Perhaps Granholm was genuinely confused by the relationship between the relative scarcity of a commodity and its price. Maybe she was just being a loyal soldier for an administration that made its hostility toward the development of new fossil-fuel-related projects thoroughly known. Eventually, though, Granholm was forced to backtrack when circumstances compelled her to beg the National Petroleum Council for relief. “While I understand you may disagree with some of our policies,” she told the industry’s embittered professionals, “it doesn’t mean the Biden administration is standing in the way of your efforts to help meet current demand.”
Their confusion was understandable. Anyone could mistake the administration’s suspension of new drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, its moratorium on oil and gas leasing on federal lands, its directive cutting off fossil fuel industries from access to federal dollars, and its throttling of projects like the Keystone XL pipeline for something approximating hostility toward conventional sources of energy.
A review of Granholm’s record in elected office does, however, suggest that her general economic illiteracy is genuine. During her tenure, the state put a ballot measure to voters that would have compelled state utilities to draw a certain percentage of their electricity from expensive renewable sources while capping the cost consumers would pay for costlier energy. Michigan’s voters did not favor a proposal that would have, by some estimates, increased consumers’ power bills by over 16 percent. They voted the measure down by a substantial margin.
New Jersey’s residents should expect no similar dispensation. If the Biden administration’s unspoken goal at its outset was to contribute to the rising costs of fossil fuels to make green alternatives artificially more economically viable, the public’s financial discomfort is a predictable and, indeed, desirable result. The voters could be expected to demand immediate relief in whatever form that takes, even if the form it takes is more price-distorting interventions in the market by political actors with ideological axes to grind.
New Jersey’s voters wanted more of the same, and that’s what they’ll get. Soon enough, they’ll wonder why the same policies have failed once again to better their circumstances. If only there were a word to describe that sort of irrationality.