This opinion piece was first published on Newsmax.com.

The Biden administration implicitly insists that American families and businesses should not take affordable energy for granted.

By “energy,” the administration means food, transportation, manufacturing, and most comforts of modern daily life.

Instead, bureaucratic regulators at Mr. Biden’s EPA suggest that U.S. consumers should prepare to pay even higher utility bills as new environmental rules further discourage energy companies from using coal and natural gas to generate power.

Natural gas is the country’s largest source of energy and coal is one of America’s most affordable. The EPA’s latest rule targets both fossil fuels, restricting their use and making them more expensive.

But, higher energy costs are never confined to energy producers.

The producers pass their extra costs along to the businesses that buy the energy needed to run the factory, work the farm, cool the warehouse, move the products, power the computers, and keep the lights on.

And those businesses then pass their higher prices along to us: the consumers still trying to make ends meet after three years of historic inflation.

Everyone but the Biden administration (apparently) understands the connection between energy costs and consumer prices.

It isn’t rocket-science.

European countries have tried ignoring immutable economic principles and the inherent relationship between energy costs and consumer prices for a few decades as their environmental leftist parties persisted in pursuing draconian energy policies couched in the Paris Climate Accord (Treaty), drafted on Dec. 12, 2015, that have made everything from fertilizers to Ferraris more expensive.

As economists at The Buckeye Institute recently showed, just one year after the European Union imposed stricter carbon emission rules, the cost of farming spiked 49%.

Europe’s farmers predictably passed those higher costs onto consumers who watched the price of grains, eggs, fruits, and cooking oils climb 42%.

As Europe experienced painful shopping, President Biden rejoined the Climate Change Treaty on his first day in office, instructed his EPA to adopt many of the same environmental rules plaguing the European Union, and pushed so-called “net-zero” carbon emissions policies that make fertilizers and farming 27 and 34% more expensive, respectively.

The administration then pretends not to notice that inflation in the United States reached 40-year highs on Mr. Biden’s watch, and food prices — which cost the average family $1,330 more per year — now chew up more disposable household income than they have since 1991.
But voters and sensible politicians have noticed.

In recent European elections, a voter “greenlash” rebuked Green party leaders and rejected much of the environmental regulatory agenda that has cost Europe farms, factories, and affordable energy.

Germany’s Green party, for example, now has half of the seats it held in 2019.

Closer to home, Rep. Troy Balderson, R-Ohio, has wisely introduced a bicameral resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the Biden administration’s latest unilateral rule that would require U.S. power plants to use expensive, unproven technology that may not live up to the environmental hype.

Congress has not and likely would not approve this new Euro-style rule because, as Congressman Balderson and his colleagues know, state and local economies made up of farms, families, and factories need affordable energy.

Without it, costs rise, prices go up, consumption goes down, and businesses suffer and fail.

Unfortunately, as the largest energy grid operator in the country has warned, heavily subsidized solar fields and wind turbines still fail to provide the affordable, consistent megawatts needed to power farms, manufacturing plants, and growing technology centers, especially in the cool and cloudy Midwest.

But natural gas, coal and nuclear energy can and do.

Congressional coalitions should support Mr. Balderson’s CRA disapproving of the EPA’s new rule.

After all, Congress should be on record supporting or opposing Mr. Biden’s federal fiats that will artificially raise the energy and production costs that will inevitably make virtually everything we buy more expensive.

Rea S. Hederman Jr., Vice President of Policy at the The Buckeye Institute.