[Onkel Neal]

Go woke, go broke... now go green, go broke?

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.

https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/democr...dumb-policies/