In February 2021, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress, “We are not climate policymakers here who can decide the way climate change will be addressed by the United States. We’re a regulatory agency that regulates a part of the economy.” When Powell said that, less than a month into the Biden administration, inflation was 1.6%.
Just eight months later, in remarks on November 22, 2021, President Biden said Powell – then up for renomination and facing stiff opposition from congressional progressives – “made clear to me: A top priority will be to accelerate the Fed’s effort to address and mitigate the risks – the risk that climate change poses to our financial system and our economy.” At that time inflation was 6.8%, on its way up to a 40-year high of 9.1%.
What changed? What caused Powell, a Republican originally appointed by President Trump, to go “freshly woke,” in Politico’s words? (Progressives had always thought him too conservative to steer the Fed in the direction they wanted.) And why would President Biden renominate a Fed Chair who was so clearly failing at his core mission of controlling inflation?
The answer is all around us: “Bidenomics.” The White House has consistently proven – by word and deed – inflation is not a priority. If it were, the administration wouldn’t be pumping trillions of dollars into the economy while dismissing the economic harm Americans have experienced. The administration is interested in lavishing money on its interest groups and its priorities. One such priority is reorienting much of American economic policy toward addressing climate change.
They say that “personnel is policy.” In this case, policy became personnel. In internal emails and emails with the media, obtained from the Department of the Treasury via Freedom of Information Act request by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), the administration appeared to be far more interested in climate change than Powell’s dismal record on inflation, even when considering whether to renominate Powell to the Fed Chair.
In the words of The Hill, Powell previously had “ruled out imposing climate-related bank stress tests similar to those in development in the U.K. and Europe. He has also refused to use the Fed’s immense power to steer funding away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, which many climate hawks consider essential to the fight against climate change.”
But that was then. Powell hadn’t forgotten his clear understanding of the Fed’s mission to serve as “the central bank of the United States to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.” He just abandoned it as a condition of remaining in office.
Meanwhile, President Biden needed Powell to remain as Fed Chair because, with the Democrat majority in the senate so thin, the White House believed nobody to Powell’s left could be confirmed. But the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors was a different story. It could be remade with more progressive members. According to Treasury emails, then-House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters had been demanding the Board be more diverse. So according to emails, a “package deal” was engineered, by which Powell would sign on to the administration’s climate change agenda, while changes would be made to the Board around him. Powell could be the face, but the body had to be sufficiently progressive.
One casualty would be Randal K. Quarles, a member of the Board of Governors, who was to resign and be replaced by a more progressive member. Meanwhile, Bidenomics staggered on. Fed policies bent toward dubious environmental concerns. The risk of recession lingers, and real average hourly earnings have declined more than 3% since January 2021. Inflation is twice as high as the Fed’s target of 2%, and nearly three times higher than it was when President Biden took office.
Powell recently told congress, “Inflation has consistently surprised us, and essentially all other forecasters, by being more persistent than expected and I think we’ve come to expect . . . it to be more persistent.” He also said, despite the official administration positivity, that the process of getting inflation back down to has a long way to go.” So, the Fed is planning to raise interest rates twice more in 2023.
The Biden administration prioritized climate change and the demands of progressive lawmakers over sound economics. It rendered an already failed Fed Chairman a figurehead unable to grapple with his fundamental responsibilities. When policy becomes personnel, you get Bidenomics.
Pete McGinnis is director of communications at the Functional Government Initiative. Article cross-posted from RealClearPolicy.
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.
