The liberty and mobility granted to average people by cheap gasoline and home energy is absolutely infuriating to socialist central planners. They need you people to stop moving around so much. You keep scuttling their glorious five-year plans.
Socialism depends on keeping the value of labor down. When the common man's labor becomes too valuable, he starts seeing himself as liberated, a successful participant in capitalism. He becomes unwilling to give his valuable time to the State.
When the average value of labor increases too much, people start thinking social safety nets should be limited and temporary. They grow resistant to demands that every cost should be "socialized," meaning EVERYONE should be dependent on government programs.
Valuable labor means employment is a seller's market, so people grow resistant to socialist demands for control over the entire economy so they can take proper care of the perpetually unemployed. People naturally sense that if labor is valuable, there must be high demand for it.
Cheap energy is one of the most important factors in making labor valuable. Highly mobile people can shop their labor around, a lesson many of us learned when our first employment options were sharply limited because we didn't have our own car yet.
Highly mobile people with access to cheap energy are also much more effective at discovering and exploiting opportunities. Central planners HATE that because it makes them look bad. They despise the vast and unpredictable power of distributed intelligence, i.e. economic freedom.
Cheap, abundant energy makes us more productive, and creates new opportunities for people to use their productivity. Labor is more valuable because more enterprises are competing to purchase employee labor and generate profit with that resource.
Socialists have a few reliable techniques for forcing the value of labor down to keep people dependent and complaint. Open borders immigration has long been a favorite. They like tinkering with the minimum wage because it forces the PRICE of labor up but depresses overall VALUE.
But nothing socialists have ever before conceived, no scheme they have hatched short of armed communist revolution and oppression, comes close to the power of Green ideology and the Climate Cult for depressing the value of labor. It's the end of the Middle Class as we know it.
Expensive and unreliable energy will permanently depress the value of labor. People will no longer feel free to travel unpredictably over long distances to pursue opportunity. They'll go where the central planners tell them to go: mass transit and short hops in electric cars.
Expensive, unreliable energy will wipe out entire industries and eliminate whole classes of employment. The labor supply will permanently, and painfully, exceed demand, creating more permanent unemployment and underemployment - opportunities for socialists to expand power.
Entry-level employment and grassroots entrepreneurs will disappear, locking more populations into permanent underemployment and dependency - which creates opportunities for the parasitic socialist elite, to nurse underclass resentments and promise them benefits.
The mania for "renewable energy" is a push to decisively weaken the Middle Class, leaving it with fewer options and opportunities, teaching it to be satisfied with less so it won't rebel against the failures of socialism. You're being programmed to accept a diminished lifestyle.
Remember Barack Obama and his munchkins musing early in his first term about how Americans really ought to be paying $8 a gallon for gas, so they would learn to drive less and reduce their carbon footprints to save the Earth? That's how these people THINK.
If you use less energy, you move around less, do less, make smaller plans, lower your expectations, and reduce your ambitions because you've been told to accept a diminished lifestyle. In every respect, the people will become smaller and easier to control. /end
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