The madness of slow Joe: Sun king edition

[EndtheMadnessNow]

The mad scientists whom Gulliver discovered in Laputa had an interesting project. They sought to extract sunlight from cucumbers.

The mad scientists have nothing on slow Joe, the president of the United States. We are in the middle of a historic rise in the price of gasoline. Prices are rising so fast that, if you didn’t fill up your car yesterday, you’ll be paying more for the privilege today. And slow Joe can take pride in his contribution to our plight.

Biden seized the moment yesterday to order “emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals,” as the AP puts it.

Everything about it is wrong with one exception. It represents Biden’s obeisance to the priorities of the lunatic left. That is the only sense in which it is right.

Solar panels are ugly. They are inefficient. They are expensive. They trash the environment. Their manufacture requires and produces toxic chemicals. They are made with slave labor. They are unreliable. They will never make up what fossil fuels contribute to the electric grid.

The Harvard Business Review adds this poignant footnote: “Economic incentives are rapidly aligning to encourage customers to trade their existing panels for newer, cheaper, more efficient models. In an industry where circularity solutions such as recycling remain woefully inadequate, the sheer volume of discarded panels will soon pose a risk of existentially damaging proportions.”

Commandeering American industry on behalf of the production of solar panels raises a question of legality under the Defense Production Act. Assuming the legality of invoking the act in this case, the administration itself appears incapable of articulating a sane rationale on behalf of its actions (video below). The Department of Energy elaborates a rationale here.

We await the president’s multi-trillion dollar plan to extract sunlight from cucumbers. It is the perfect complement to his so-called “clean energy” goals.

   REPORTER: "On solar panels; how is this not a gift to Chinese solar manufacturers, many of whom operate with forced labor and are subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party?"

   JEAN-PIERRE: "Today's announcement is about one country & one county alone & it's the United States." (Twitter)

Article from Powerline blog.