We’re Not Short on Power. We’re Just Too Sanctimonious To Generate It.
The headlines framed it as another Trump tariff story: Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatening a 25 percent retaliation on American energy exports. But the real story of the Northeastern energy crisis is more than cross-border drama and goes back well before the tariffs and trumpeting.
Ford’s threat is the latest lash in a decades-long ritual of energy self-flagellation. U.S. regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping American electricity production with regulation after regulation, smothering new projects in the name of preservation, wetlands, or the northeastern bulrush sedge—often before they even break ground. Instead of building up capacity, we import Canadian power to keep the emissions off our ledgers like mafia accountants, cleverly skirting the law while they convince the world they’re making us cleaner, greener, and smarter, even as the lights flicker and the bills climb.
The people paying the price are not in press conferences or policy meetings. They’re at home, choosing between groceries and the gas bill. I met them last winter in North Philly. I was there to run focus groups on the impact of rising energy costs.
A father talked about replacing Olive Garden dinners with SpaghettiOs, ashamed that Little League wins no longer earned a night out. A grad student turned her one-bedroom apartment into a boarding house—three people sharing the space just to keep the lights on. A restaurant owner described her kitchen working in winter coats because they couldn’t afford to run the heat. These weren’t sob stories. They were quiet portraits of sacrifice and grit.
Since then, prices have jumped another 7 percent despite our reliance on Canadian imports.
In 2024, the U.S. imported 27,200 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to cover up to 20 percent of New York’s supply or 15 percent of New England’s total winter load—because we’ve made building new power here nearly impossible and incentivized imported power through regulatory loopholes that allow us to ignore any emissions that happen outside the U.S.
It’s a simple formula: export emissions, import virtue. Meanwhile, domestic energy projects in the Northeast stall, sputter, or collapse.
We’re sitting on 469 billion tons of coal, 2.9 trillion cubic feet of gas, and centuries of nuclear fuel. But in the U.S., building power plants now requires a legal team and a decade of hearings. We’ve turned power generation into a theater of guilt—where producing energy in the U.S. is too sinful to permit
Article from Reason.com
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