This is your energy industry on socialism

OPINION:

Americans of a certain age remember one of the most famous public service announcements of the 1980s. A man held up an egg and said, “This is your brain.” Then he pointed to a hot frying pan and said, “This is drugs.” He cracked the egg into the pan, watched it sizzle and delivered the unforgettable conclusion: “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

Many of the young, blue-haired socialists now canvassing for Democratic Socialists of America candidates were not alive when those spots ran. So, consider this their updated public service announcement.

This is America’s energy industry. This is socialism. Let us look at America’s energy industry on socialism.

DSA recently released its “Workers Deserve More” platform, a document that reads as if assembled by people who believe electricity appears when the government passes a resolution demanding it.

The platform imagines a future wherein Americans will not have bills because energy, food, medicine and transportation will become “common goods and utilities.” It demands “massive” government investment in publicly owned energy infrastructure. It calls for the country to “phase out the use of fossil fuels.”

That is not merely a proposal to regulate power companies more aggressively. It is a blueprint for government control of the energy system, combined with the elimination of the fuels that currently provide most of America’s dependable energy.

The platform does not identify anything to replace the fuel we currently use, nor does it provide a timetable or, most important, a price tag.

Socialism becomes much easier when you never have to show your work.

However, we have a real-world example of the future of America’s energy industry under DSA: Cuba. Just make sure you look during daylight hours, because it gets awfully dark there at night.

About the same time DSA was trotting out its plan, Cuba faced an islandwide blackout for the second time in one week. Nearly 10 million people were affected as the country struggled with an aging, poorly maintained electrical grid and severe fuel shortages.

Mandated outages in Cuba can last longer than 24 consecutive hours. Public transportation has largely stopped, and officials have canceled tens of thousands of surgeries.

Of course, Cuba’s government blames U.S. sanctions, but sanctions did not create the system that delivered decades of inadequate maintenance or regime requirements to place its energy economy under political control.

That distinction matters because America has almost everything Cuba lacks: abundant natural resources, private investment, technological innovation, competing companies and the ability to produce enormous amounts of energy.

The DSA proposal would attack those advantages in the name of political ideology. It would replace investors with bureaucrats and replace realities with promises that nobody will have to pay a bill.

Many of us recall all too well the Green New Deal trial subscription under President Biden. Mr. Biden did not implement the full DSA platform, but his administration embraced the same basic belief: that fossil fuels should be restricted and gradually replaced through federal mandates and subsidies.

The results were … not encouraging. The national average price for gasoline reached a record in June 2022. That same month, inflation hit 9.1%, the largest 12-month increase since 1981.

DSA wants to go much further.

Make no mistake, the absence of costs and numbers in the DSA platform is not youthful political inexperience. The more likely explanation is that its authors understand that an honest price tag would terrify the public.

Phasing out fossil fuels, nationalizing essential industries and rebuilding the power system around politically approved resources would cost trillions of dollars. The financial burden would fall hardest on working families through more taxes, higher prices and restricted choices.

Not to worry; the elites promoting the plan will be fine.

Sen. Bernard Sanders’ campaign spent more than $550,000 on private jet travel in 2025 while touring the country to warn Americans about oligarchs and climate change. Apparently, the socialist revolution does not wait in the TSA line.

That is how these systems always work. Ordinary people are told to sacrifice. Meanwhile, the politically connected keep traveling, consuming and living comfortably. Cuba’s ruling class does not sit in the dark like everyone else. There is no reason to believe that America’s socialist elite would behave differently.

DSA is offering Americans a future of government-owned energy and unexplained costs while promising that everything will somehow remain affordable and reliable. Just like Cuba.

So, here is the lesson. Socialism is what happens when the egg finally hits the pan.

Any questions?

• Larry Behrens is an energy expert and the communications director for Power The Future. He is also the author of “Power Restored: President Trump’s First Year and the Revival of American Energy Leadership.” You can follow him on X/Twitter @larrybehrens.