Hey Mom, How Much Gas Can We Get?

Mrs. Miller pulls into the gas station and circles around to a middle pump. Ten-year-old Ethan jumps out of the car and comes around to her window, eagerly awaiting instructions. Mrs. Miller picks up her phone, checks her bank balance and does some quick mental math. “Fifteen dollars,” she says with a smile that betrays her uncertainty. Ethan hustles to the pump, which he only last week learned to operate all by himself.

Gas or new shoes?

At this point in the story, some readers will have two questions and some will have none. The two questions are this: why only fifteen dollars and what is she uncertain about? But if you’ve walked in Mrs. Miller’s shoes (or driven her car) then you know both answers. After the gas station it’s the grocery, the big-box for Ethan’s sorely needed new sneakers, and the pharmacy for his older sister home with the flu. She also needs to pay the light bill, which was due yesterday, and the heating oil, which is due today.

Being a mom for more than a decade, Mrs. Miller has performed this operation enough times that she can work the numbers in a few seconds. She estimates and adds up the expenses, deducts from her bank balance (leaving a small amount in reserve) and determines how much she can spend at the pump. That’s the fifteen dollars. The uncertainty? That’s just a component of her daily life.

Now it might seem like I’m leaning too far into the hard-luck story. But, as I mentioned in a previous piece, nearly eight in ten Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and more than 20 million households are behind on their utility bills. So yes, I made up the particulars, but it’s a reasonable extrapolation.

Media weren’t interested in Trump talking about cheap energy

Meanwhile in real life, it was about an hour into Donald Trump’s conversation with Joe Rogan that they started talking about energy.

They hit on the irony of EV mandates and grid strains. They discuss benefits and misconceptions about nuclear (which we covered in a recent BEN video and blog post). And they talk about how America has more than enough cheap oil and natural gas right under our feet (and how we can produce it without ecological damage).

But with regard to my story here, it’s not what Mr. Rogan and Mr. Trump discussed that caught my attention. Rather it’s the reaction from certain media outlets who are more interested in fact checking than message grasping. One particular network quickly produced a list of thirty-two falsehoods which they couldn’t wait to tell us about. Contained in the “yuge” list of grievances are five from the energy conversation, including an entire paragraph proving that California does not, in fact, have “brownouts every weekend.” Thank you for that clarification.

Coming back to my story about Mrs. Miller, I’m sure she is relieved to know that the Bay Area lights don’t go out every weekend. She takes solace knowing the budget for charging stations was only $7.5 billion and not $9 billion. And her life is enriched by the exposition of technicalities related to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

How can you bring down utility bills?

And therein lies the message so readily overlooked by the debunkers. What Mrs. Miller wants to know is what can you do to bring down my utility bills? Because then maybe her day would entail a little less uncertainty and a little more confidence. If we could take Mrs. Miller’s bills back to what they were when her first child was born, perhaps she wouldn’t have to struggle as much to buy that child clothes for the next school year.

I’m not suggesting that Mr. Rogan and Mr. Trump laid out a specific plan to help Mrs. Miller. But the spirit of their discussion is about energy abundance and affordability, which matters to most Americans. That’s the conversation we should be having. That’s the story to cover. If democracy dies in darkness, then lets talk about the literal darkness people try to avoid while making ends meet.

But no. Today we are more concerned with calling foul on every utterance that doesn’t please the fact-check gods—even those meant as irony or sarcasm. We’re also far more preoccupied with the well-being of the planet than the people living on it. And yet (speaking of irony), the political and ideological forces that drive energy policy give a free pass to preferred options that turn out to be not so green, reliable or cheap.

Nuance me no nuance! I can’t buy enough gas when I need it!

But Mrs. Miller doesn’t care about these nuances. She cares about how much gas she can put into her car today. And whether she’ll have enough money left over to buy those sneakers.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.