Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies

 Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill: Rates are set to soar, starting next month — and double over the next two years.

If you’re a progressive, you can’t complain. What did you think would happen, based on your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?

On Thursday, the state’s Public Service Commission OK’d hikes of 9.1% for electricity and 8.4% for gas, starting in August, along with additional jumps though 2025. At that point, typical bills will have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an extra $840 a year.  

A whining letter from the City Council demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul use her executive powers to stop the pain. 

The letter called out an “already dire affordability crisis” and included specious worries about poor New Yorkers. 

That “affordability crisis,” notably, is also of the left’s own making, thanks to its anti-housing, inflation-fueling polices. 

Why is Con Ed hiking rates? 

True, execs at the company did enjoy a pay bump in 2022, with CEO Timothy Cawley getting a 4% hike in base compensation.

But the central driver is idiotic green policies, both at the state and federal level — clamping down on fossil-fuel use, forcing infrastructure improvements to handle the shift, taxing utilities to the hilt, etc.

That fuels costs that get passed on to consumers.

This week, Team Biden struck yet another blow in its war against domestic energy production, jacking up costs for drillers on federal land: Royalty rates will rise from 12.5% to almost 17%; minimum per-acre lease bids will quintuple. 

The administration estimates this will cost producers some $1.8 billion over the next eight years — with the possibility of yet more cost hikes to come.

A perfect prescription to discourage future exploration and make extraction more costly.  

And the same progs whinging about Con Ed rate hikes applaud this nonsense. 

Just as they applauded the state’s insane Climate Leadership and Action Plan.

That brainchild of Albany Dems, signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, aims to make New York’s power generation 100% emissions-free by 2040.

The costly upgrades demanded by that plan, in preparation for our (still nonexistent) transition to green energy, are a big contributor to Con Ed’s rising costs. 

And this followed Cuomo’s painful ban on fracking (a source of much cleaner fuel for power) and came as he moved to shutter a major source of emissions-free power, the Indian Point nuclear plant. 

On top of all that, 21% of the average consumer’s electric bill goes to cover Con Ed’s New York state property taxes.

The fallout from this, as anyone capable of basic arithmetic could have foreseen, is higher power costs for consumers across the board. 

And those costs hit low-income families, who can least afford it, hard.

That’s never part of the affluent greenies’ calculus, of course. No doubt they figure they can always somehow squeeze the rich to subsidize the higher costs. (Until that money runs out, too, anyway.)

The truth is, progressive fantasies about high-tech windmills and solar panels won’t keep costs down; they’ll keep boosting them — unless, of course, they trigger blackouts. Then no one will have to pay a dime, while they sit in the dark, with no AC.