As reported by The New York Times Magazine at the time, Joe Biden’s goal was to transform the economy from the get-go: “The Biden Team Wants to Transform the Economy. Really.” Nearly two-and-a-half years later, the damage and chaos of that transformation process are obvious: continuing high inflation (especially energy, food, and gasoline prices), rising interest rates, recession predictions, a stagnant economy, depleted individual savings, sky-high credit card debt, and other indications of stagflation and recession.
Who has benefited from the Biden economy? Green-New-Deal grifters benefit from the gargantuan tax subsidies and federal spending on transitioning the U.S. economy from hydrocarbon energy sources to “clean” sources, especially solar and wind energy.
The communist Chinese are happy to benefit from Biden’s economic policies, which ultimately mandate and subsidize green products from Chinese companies at the expense of the U.S. companies who produce and use hydrocarbons.
Let us examine the issue.
Bidenomics
The Biden economic plan was the reverse of the Trump plan—the latter emphasizing low inflation delivered through U.S. energy independence and moderate federal taxation and regulations. Biden entered office as the COVID-19 pandemic was ending, with the macroeconomic balance being “excess demand and low supply.” The demand was created by federal stimulus bills passed in 2020, including the $2.2 trillion CARES Act (March), the $483 billion Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act (April), and the $920 billion Consolidated Appropriations Act (December). The pandemic itself created supply chain problems virtually across the board.
The Biden economic program was intended to capitalize on the unique circumstances (chaos and fear) created by the pandemic to implement a radical transformation of the U.S. economy. As noted here, Biden promised this during his 2020 campaign: “I truly think that if we do this right, we have an incredible opportunity to not just dig out of this crisis, but to fundamentally transform the country.”
Democrats in Congress subsequently passed and Biden signed a $1.9 trillion spending bill misnamed “The American Rescue Plan.” This bill increased demand while discouraging work through direct federal benefits to individuals (and dependence on government for income), continuing supply chain disruptions and supply shortages, drying up individual savings accounts while increasing credit card debt balances of average Americans, and resulting in the historic levels of inflation experienced in the United States in 2022.
Perhaps the most damaging elements of Biden’s economic plan involve efforts to transition the U.S. economy from hydrocarbon energy sources to “green and clean” sources such as wind and solar through federal regulations and subsidies under the Democrats’ proposed “Green New Deal.” Biden campaign promises (gaffes?) were a harbinger. From September 2019: “I guarantee we’re going to end fossil fuel.” Biden’s subsequent actions in office have included killing oil pipeline projects, refusing to grant oil leases, refusing to approve drilling permits, and limiting the ability of energy companies to obtain financing.
Biden’s Green Policies
Federal subsidies and federal regulations form the basis of the Biden green policies that underpin Bidenomics. Most of the federal funding for green projects was accomplished and sold politically under the guise of the $430 billion “Inflation Reduction Act,” which was passed along party lines in August 2022. The Washington Post let the cat out of the bag in April 2023 with this excerpt from an article: “Last year’s climate spending bill, called the Inflation Reduction Act, … ” So much for “reducing inflation”!
Regulations are a main weapon in the Biden administration’s arsenal in forcing the green transformation of the U.S. economy. Last August, Biden issued “Implementing Instructions for Executive Order 14057, Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability.” EO 14057 forces unsustainable green energy technologies into the federal government and, subsequently, throughout the U.S. economy that will lead to the displacement of all of America’s hydrocarbon energy sources under Biden’s “Federal Sustainability Plan.”
A key top-down regulatory effort consistent with that EO is to require corporations to adhere to so-called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting requirements in their periodic financial disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In a press release last year, the SEC “proposed amendments to rules and reporting forms to promote consistent, comparable, and reliable information for investors concerning funds’ and advisers’ incorporation of ESG factors.” Companies would be forced to conform to left-wing environmental requirements for climate risk management plans, and noncompliance could result in fines and penalties in the future if/when these SEC guidelines are implemented.
In demonstrating a continuing commitment to implementing radical ESG compliance monitoring measures, Biden issued his very first veto on March 20, 2o23 to protect the ability of the federal government to monitor and regulate ESG mandates—“halting a Republican-led effort to overturn a federal rule allowing retirement plan advisers to take environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors into account.”
EPA Regulations
A key regulatory effort to force Americans away from hydrocarbon energy sources has been the EPA’s ever-tightening rules that govern the emissions of power plants and vehicles. As reported by The Epoch Times on May 11, “the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled its strictest-ever rules for power produced using natural gas, coal, and oil that could spur the use of carbon capture technologies … to induce U.S. power plants to boost their use of certain technologies, including the co-firing of fossil fuels with what it calls low-greenhouse gas (GHG) hydrogen and, in particular, the capture, sequestration, and storage of carbon.”
The EPA has also supported California’s new emission rules that will eliminate the use of diesel trucks over time. As reported by ABC News on March 31, the EPA’s decision “allows California to require truck manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission trucks over the next couple of decades. The rule applies to a wide range of trucks including box trucks, semitrailers and even large passenger pick-ups.”
Not Just the EPA
In jumping through Biden’s EO 14057 hoops, other federal agencies are pushing green fantasies, too.
In a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 3, 2023, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) obtained from Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk an estimate of “trillions of dollars” required for implementing Biden’s carbon neutrality goals in the United States by 2050 (see video here).
In April 2022, the Dept of Energy effectively banned traditional light bulbs by arbitrarily changing rules on light bulb efficiency.
The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission proposed to ban gas stoves just last month, according to the Daily Caller.
Concluding Thoughts
Communist China is a key beneficiary of Bidenomics—particularly as relates to green technology exports—and U.S. policy won’t be changing anytime soon. U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs, Jay Shambaugh, made the following statement in a recent Bloomberg interview: “The U.S. is not seeking to decouple from China. We’re not seeking to limit China’s growth. Those aren’t our strategic objectives.”
The Biden administration’s ongoing transformation of the U.S. economy into a green dystopia further incentivizes the importation of Chinese-made green technologies and adds to the U.S.-China trade deficit, since China is the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels.
Article cross-posted from The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
