Commentary
Many Americans are woefully unaware of the impending (and in Europe, already underway) spikes in energy prices and shortages of supply. Last month, it was reported that the United States has only
25 days’ worth of diesel fuel remaining—the lowest level in October since the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) began such reporting in 1982—while seasonal demand is the highest since 2007. Far less than needed is available and in transit to replace this existing stockpile when it’s exhausted, and some predict that supplies won’t return to normal levels until next summer at the earliest.
Diesel-fueled engines transport nearly all consumer products. They’re in trucks, trains, ships, and barges. Diesel also powers most farm and construction equipment, as well as most local, interstate, and school buses. The problems with electric buses in Duluth and Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota; Kent, Washington; and Hamden, Connecticut—where one of 12 electric buses spontaneously
burst into flames while parked in a bus yard—indicate that diesel is a safer, more stable, and more reliable technology.
Jet fuel is a diesel-related product and is also seeing price spikes and supply shortages, especially on the east coast. Yet the Department of Energy
announced in September a long-term plan with the airlines to have 3 billion gallons of less-polluting sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) by 2030 and then enough SAFs to address 100 percent of demand by 2050. The Biden administration’s interests and priorities are too focused on these starry-eyed visions of a future green utopia while it irresponsibly ignores the supply and price problems in jet fuel that demand its immediate action.
Home heating oil is another diesel-related product (diesel, jet fuel, and home heating oil are in a family called distillates), and although only about 5 percent of U.S. homes use it—
48 percent use natural gas and 39 percent electricity—in the northeast United States, the proportion using home heating oil is far higher:
19 percent in New York,
25 percent in Massachusetts,
29 percent in Rhode Island,
40 percent in Connecticut,
42 percent in Vermont,
43 percent in New Hampshire, and
61 percent in Maine. State stockpiles of home heating oil in the New England states are only about one-third of what they normally are at this time. Furthermore, the
Energy Department anticipates that home heating oil prices nationwide will be 27 percent higher this year compared to last year. This increase will surely be significantly higher in the northeast, and that assumes that supply will continue to be available there at all.
It isn’t alarmist to worry about a scarce heating oil-related public health emergency in the northeast involving deaths and injuries from hypothermia (frostbite) as well as fire and asphyxiation. As heating oil becomes unaffordable or unavailable, the inexperienced may improvise with wood, improperly vented kerosene, propane, or other similar appliances, and space heaters that may ignite nearby material or overload extension cords or electric panels.
Deaths from residential fires have declined steadily in the United States over the past century and today are only about one-third of what they were in 1980 (23 per million population in 1980 to 8.7 per million population in 2021) (
pdf). If the historically dependable heating solutions become prohibitively expensive or unusable for lack of fuel, this trend will see an abrupt reversal and spike up for the first time.
We Americans have long been oblivious to basic real-world facts that make our technology-dependent lives possible. When OPEC imposed its first oil embargo on the United States in October 1973, surveys at the time showed that most Americans didn’t know that their country imported any oil. Today, few Americans aren’t paying attention to the risks that fuel scarcity poses to our country’s commerce and to our way of life.
President Joe Biden claims that the loss of 700,000 barrels per day of petroleum and related products imported from Russia starting in March is the cause of our energy supply troubles. Then why,
according to the EIA—the public reporting agency of his administration’s Department of Energy—did U.S. exports of petroleum increase in the first six months of 2022 by 11 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2021, reaching their highest levels since 1973? U.S. exports of distillates (diesel, jet fuel, and home heating oil, all made from petroleum) increased by 19 percent over the same six-month period in 2021. When White House spokesman John Kirby was asked about this in late October, he seemed blithely unconcerned.
Although the problem is most acute for those who rely on oil for home heat, the outlook is also sobering for the nearly 90 percent of Americans who use either electricity or natural gas. The
EIA forecasts wholesale electricity rates nationwide to rise by between 20 and 60 percent in 2023, and New England’s largest electric utility,
National Grid, informed its retail electric customers to expect price increases of 64 percent this winter: This increase began on Nov. 1. The CEO of New England’s largest diversified energy utility, Eversource, took the extraordinary step of
writing to Biden at the end of October to raise the alarm over a possible “serious public health and safety threat” from a natural gas shortage. (Because natural gas is itself an end-use residential fuel and is also used to generate electricity, it affects customers who use either solution for heat.)
The success of environmentalist extremists in New England and their captive politicians in thwarting new interstate natural gas pipelines means that the region is perilously reliant on a few legacy interstate pipelines being pushed to capacity and on ship deliveries to a single terminal in Everett, Massachusetts. And a century-old law, the Jones Act, requires that any natural gas shipped by sea from one U.S. location to another U.S. location must be transported on American-flagged ships with American crews. The shortsighted decisions to reject new interstate natural gas pipelines and the antiquated requirements on ships and crews for natural gas transported by sea domestically create unnecessary inefficiencies, delays, risks, and vulnerabilities in delivering this crucial resource.
None of this apparently concerns Biden or his allies. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, campaigning for governor, has bragged that she was responsible for blocking two natural gas pipelines from entering Massachusetts over the past decade, something that she seemingly doesn’t regret even with the prospect that Massachusetts residents will shiver in the dark in the months ahead.
Whether the existing political leadership is ignorant, incompetent, or malign, the following conclusion is certain: We are on our own.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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