Liberal energy policies that restricted fossil fuel supply may trigger social unrest, says Blackstone co-founder

Energy prices are skyrocketing at home and across the globe. In Minnesota, gas prices, home heating and electricity will be higher than in the last several years. A recent article in Bloomberg forecasts that things will only get worse.

Bloomberg reports that Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone Inc., said the world could face energy scarcities so severe that they trigger social unrest.

“We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy,” Schwarzman said at a conference in Saudi Arabia. “And when you have a shortage it’s just going to cost more and it’s probably going to cost a lot more. And when that happens you’re going to get very unhappy people around the world, in the emerging markets in particular.”

“Inflation, we are in a new regime,” said Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock Inc, the world’s biggest asset manager. “There are many structural reasons for that. Short term policy related to environmentalism, in terms of restricting supply of hydrocarbons, has created energy inflation and we are going to be living with that for some time.”

“We’re not focusing on long-term solutions, we’re not trying to change the world in a granular basis,” said Fink. “We have these visions we could go from a brown world and we could wake up tomorrow there’d be a green world. That is not going to happen.”

This is a major admission that almost no one is talking about. Liberal policymakers have sought to restrict the supply and consumption of fossil fuels at nearly every turn. As a result, investment in these essential fuels has declined, but demand has not, resulting in skyrocketing prices.

Demand for fossil fuels has not fallen because rather than support nuclear power, which can actually replace fossil fuels, liberal lawmakers have spent billions of dollars to incentivize the construction of expensive and unreliable wind turbines and solar panels that have a nasty habit of not showing up when we need them most.

Wind and solar advocates pretend that burning fossil fuels will cause social unrest by contributing to global warming, but the real cause of social unrest will be high prices and supply shortages for the energy we all rely upon.