Immediately after becoming president, Joe Biden implemented a series of measures aimed at limiting fossil fuel use. He canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, stopped all oil and natural gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and revoked Trump-era orders that had decreased regulations on federal lands while increasing the ability for the U.S. to produce our own energy.

Biden put in place rules and regulations that artificially increased the regulatory costs of fossil fuel energy production. He next sent out an executive order that announced a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands and in offshore waters. Then he announced changes in federal oil and gas permitting and leases that discouraged energy production.

Biden’s crackdown on fossil fuels is happening at the same time his policies promoting electrifying everything are expected to raise the demand for electricity and increase its cost. We are already experiencing the effects of his vendetta against the oil industry. Remember during the Trump administration how energy prices and inflation were low? Now the price of gas has doubled, and along with that, inflation has skyrocketed.

Almost everything we do and buy is affected by these energy prices. Energy costs for shipping and production are a huge expense for many companies. And many times, those costs are a determining factor in whether these companies survive. They must be able to pass that increase on to you, the customer. A trip to your local grocery store or your favorite fast-food restaurant proves that. Ouch.

Biden intends to have 67% of new cars sold by 2032 be electric. The administration is also backing the electrification of appliances such as stoves and heaters. At the same time when Biden and the environmental extremists are making all these plans for us and our future, we must look at what they have done so far. California, which has enacted most of the policies advocated by environmental groups, now is having power shortages and rolling blackouts during much of its peak usage times. These peak usage times are in midsummer when the temperatures are in the high 90s or the 100s, or during the winter when it is freezing cold. Most people will have no backup power source. People will probably die. Should we be following their lead?

Also, people will be forced to buy generators, probably gas-powered, to supplement their power supply. How will that help our air pollution?

For more than 70 years, the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee, a Portland, Ore.-based industry trade group, has analyzed demand projections from utilities in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to predict future demand for electricity throughout the region. They are predicting that electricity demand for the Pacific Northwest is going to grow more than 30% in the next decade. This is more than the 5% that was estimated last year and triple the prediction of three years ago.

These experts predict: “Large data centers, an increase in high-tech manufacturing and growing electrification in homes, buildings and transportation are key factors in the forecast.”

Oregon’s data centers are the fifth largest in the nation and employ large numbers of people. Companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and X, which was formerly Twitter, have huge data centers in eastern Oregon that require massive amounts of energy to operate. The people of the Northwest take our low energy prices for granted. But companies such as these don’t. Their very survival depends on cheap energy, and they’re probably in the Pacific Northwest because of that.

If we breach the four lower Snake River dams that supply us with cheap, reliable energy, companies such as these could very well relocate. I’m sure other parts of our country would welcome them. China is building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world so they can produce cheap, dependable energy. I’m sure they would love to have these companies and their jobs.

At the same time that China and other countries are trying to develop cheap, dependable energy to create jobs and stimulate their economies, we are destroying ours. Four dams on the Klamath River in Oregon are now being torn out in the name of “saving our salmon.” Granted, these are old dams with no fish passageways. But that could have been remedied. Fish ladders could have been built or trucks could have hauled fish around the dams. Once these dams are gone, Biden and the radical environmentalists will claim “placing fish over dams” as a precedent, and double down on tearing out the four lower Snake River Dams. What they don’t want to talk about is the fact that rivers all along the West Coast of the United States and Canada are suffering from low fish numbers brought on by industrial fishing techniques by many countries. This massive slaughter of fish has been going on since the mid-1860s. They also ignore the studies that show the four lower Snake River dams are some of the most fish-friendly dams in the world.

People of our region take our cheap power and plentiful jobs for granted. Like the old saying goes, “You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.”

We need to rise up and do something before we lose it all.

Please join the fight with Citizens for the Preservation of Fish and Dams Inc. to join the fight at our website, cfpfd.org; email citizensforfishdam@gmail.com; or contact us at P.O. Box 73, Lewiston, ID 83501.

Dugger retired as a journeyman carpenter from Clearwater Paper. He lives in Lewiston.