Halloween is usually a time to celebrate the fun side of the spooky season—costumes, candy and carved pumpkins. Unfortunately, there are some genuinely scary things going on in the energy world. Here’s just a few you may have missed:

• As the Biden Administration continues to push a massive shift to electric vehicles (EVs), a new study revealed that the EV industry received nearly $22 billion in subsidies and credits. Without that artificial support, already expensive EVs would cost as much as $50,000 more per vehicle. Now, that’s a jump scare. The same study showed that the true cost of fueling an EV is equal to $17.33 per gallon of gasoline! Yet, even with that taxpayer safety net, Ford just announced that it lost $3 billion on its EV ventures so far this year and will postpone $12 billion in EV investments.
• America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has been lowered to a level that is downright terrifying. President Biden sold off nearly half of it attempting to cut gasoline prices driven up by his own policies. The SPR currently contains 351 million barrels of oil—44% lower than it was when Biden took office and the lowest it’s been since 1983 when the SPR was still being filled. At that level, if we faced a real-life energy emergency that forced us to rely solely on the SPR, it would only last for 17 days.
• As it has with other critical minerals, China tightened its hold on exporting graphite, a key material in building the batteries necessary for EVs and renewable energy. China is the world’s top graphite producer and exporter, and it refines more than 90% of the world’s supply. Much like the clueless horror movie victim wandering off alone in the dark, the Biden Administration continues to walk America into the same Chinese “green energy” trap over and over.

As we’ve been saying all along, the answer to a less scary world is American energy leadership. We worked hard to surpass real-life villains like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s top producer of natural gas and oil. We have decades or more of American energy resources to support us at home and our allies abroad. Americans deserve energy security, affordability and independence, rather than a green-at-all-costs nightmare. For more information, please, check out The Empowerment Alliance.