Who’s to blame for sky-high energy bills in New York? Not Trump. 

Kathy Hochul recently attacked President Trump for driving up energy prices for New Yorkers. The governor warned that Trump’s trade dispute with Canada could lead to higher costs for New York residents after Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to retaliate by cutting electricity exports to the United States. 

“There’s exactly one person to blame when electricity bills go up: Donald Trump,” Hochul said. 

One might wonder why New Yorkers depend on Canada to supply their electricity when the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer, and our country’s natural gas output, the largest feedstock for electricity production, has expanded by nearly 50 percent over the past decade.     

As the New York governor well knows, it is the war waged by herself and her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, against those same fossil fuels (which supply some 60 percent of the nation’s electricity) that have spiked electricity prices. Also boosting costs was the former governor’s boneheaded decision to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power station. Those two disastrous policies combined to push residential electricity prices in New York fully 62 percent above the national average, the third highest in the nation. Cuomo and Hochul traded affordable electricity for votes and donations from climate zealots, in the process costing residents of the Empire State billions of dollars.  

Yes, oil prices have climbed 25 percent over the past year, in large part because of the war with Iran. But that jump pales in significance to New York formally banning fracking in 2015, thus depriving residents not only of jobs and income but also plentiful natural gas. It is no surprise that electricity prices in Pennsylvania, which allowed fracking of the Marcellus shale in that state, are about 30 percent lower than in Hochul’s New York. 

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