by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously advised, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
He was talking about the financial crisis of 2008, which Congress was so desperate to address that it readily agreed to trillions in new spending. Economists and historians still debate whether stimulus checks and bank bailouts were wise, but the financial crisis was real.
Some politicians, though, may have learned “Rahm’s Rule” too well. If no crisis justifies the extreme measures they propose, they’re willing to create one.
By executive order, President Biden set a goal to eliminate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In rejoining the Paris Accord, an international agreement never ratified by the Senate, he committed to transitioning America’s electric power generation to 100% renewable sources by 2035, which would require doubling and perhaps tripling the capacity of U.S. electric transmission systems. Such a fundamental transformation of the U.S. economy would cause further congestion on America’s power grids and impose substantially higher costs on consumers.
