Wall Street Journal: Inflation Is Caused by Bad Weather

The Wall Street Journal published an article on Tuesday claiming that the country’s current inflation woes can be traced to bad weather — though, curiously, the article did not mention “climate change” as the cause of dramatic weather events.

The Journal‘s Ryan Dezember wrote:

Policy makers and investors have debated the effects of fiscal and monetary policy on inflation, but a big reason for rising prices this year have been factors that neither lawmakers nor central banks can do much about. Prices for natural gas, lumber, corn, soybeans, wheat and other building blocks of modern commerce surged to multiyear highs—in some cases records—because of fire, freezes, flood, drought, hurricanes and some of the hottest weather ever.

…

It all started in February when Texas froze over. Winter Storm Uri drove up demand for natural gas for heat while clogging wells with ice, which drastically reduced production in the region that needed fuel to stay warm.

…

In South America, the worst drought in decadesscorched growing regions, wilting Brazil’s export corn crop and leaving the Paraná River too shallow for fully loaded boats to pass from Argentina’s interior to Atlantic shipping lanes. By mid-May, corn and soybean futures had risen to their highest prices in several years.

Drought struck North America, drying up hydropower in the West. One big hydropower station in northern California had to be shut down completely when Lake Oroville dropped beneath the water level needed to generate electricity. Natural gas and coal were burned to cover the shortfall, driving up prices.

Read the full article here.

Critics of the radical environmentalist movement have noted that the left tends to blame everything on climate change.

An editorial three years ago in Investor’s Business Daily observed: “Pick a topic and add ‘climate change’ to it in a Google search and you’re likely to find some article or study suggesting a connection between the two.”

Other explanations for inflation have tended to focus on a surge in consumer demand, a glut of federal spending, and low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, as well as supply chain problems caused by a variety of management inefficiencies.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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