Ever wondered how much inflation is due to energy costs?
ChatGPT helped me estimate that figure and estimate the hidden tax arising from Biden climate policies
According to ChatGPT, 70% of United States oil consumption is used in transportation. There are approximately 126 million households in the United States and each household spent about $9,500 on transportation in 2020.
The United States consumes 7.3 billion barrels of oil a year. The impact of higher oil prices on transportation inflation is easy to calculate. A $10 a barrel rise in the price of oil is $73 billion dollars or $406 per household ($73,000,000,000 x .7)/126,000,000=$406). The average oil price in 2021 was $71 a barrel, and the average in 2020 was ~$42 a barrel, a rise of $29 or an increased cost per household of $1,177. Transportation inflation from rising oil prices alone amounted to $1,177/$9,500 or 12%.
What about food inflation? ChatGPT says transportation amounts to 5% to 15% of food costs. A 17.7% rise in transporation costs adds 17.7% of (say) 10% of food costs or 1.77% inflation. For transportation intensive foodstuffs like produce, that figure is more like 8% to 15%.
To put a bit more flesh on the bones of that datum, Americans spend about $1.5 trillion on food annually and the higher price of oil added $27 billion to food costs or about $210 per household in 2021.
Looking soley at transportation and food, the rise in oil prices from $42 a barrel in 2020 to $71 a barrel in 2021 added $1,387 to the costs every American household had to absorb in 2021. But oil prices did not stop at $71 a barrel but kept rising, hitting over $120 a barrel in early 2022 and averaging $93.89 a barrel for the entire 2022 year. The cost per U.S. household of inane energy policies in 2022 was ~$3,000 for transportation and food alone, a drag of almost $400 billion for which consumers got absolutely nothing.
You can add to that the cost of home heating which approximately doubled from the $1,450 ChatGPT reports was the average cost per household in 2021.
Joe Biden’s silly “climate change” fixation (unsupported by any credible science) has been a hidden “tax” on Americans to the tune of about $550 billion in just two years. The poorest American households bore the greatest burden of this hidden tax.
It is a sad state of affairs when elected leaders buy into aphysical and nonsensical theories and take actions that damage the economy and impose needless suffering on the citizens they were elected to represent. Climate policies that drive up energy prices grounded on the baseless theory that CO2 causes climate change are precisely that.
Phyicist Dieter Schindknecht’s recent analysis of radiative transfer published in the prestigious International Journal of Modern Physics demonstrated conclusively that rising CO2 levels have virtually no impact on global average temperatures after concentrations reached 300 ppm by volume (passed several years ago) and a “climate sensitivity” of only ~0.5 degrees Celsius before that point.
Rather than rely on flawed temperature data over two centuries and inappropriate linear regressions in a complex, chaotic non-linear climate system, Schindknecht simply applied proven laws of physics to the issue. He should get the Nobel prize.
Biden should be run out of Washington on a rail and John Kerry with him. Trudeau, no better, should suffer the same fate and Canada can do without Steven Guilbeault or Jonathan Wilkinson in Parliament.