Leadership Quote by Greg Walden

A 50% rise since 2000 is the kind of clean, prosecutorial statistic politicians love: it’s big enough to alarm, round enough to remember, and vague enough to recruit to almost any energy argument. Greg Walden isn’t offering a neutral data point so much as a framing device. “Since 2000” quietly picks a baseline that invites a story of long-term drift and policy failure; it implies the public has been getting a bad deal for a generation, regardless of who was in charge at any given moment. The phrasing “base power rates” does similar work. It sounds technical, almost actuarial, which gives the claim an aura of objectivity while sidestepping the messy stuff that actually moves bills: time-of-use pricing, fuel-cost adjustments, regional market shocks, and the difference between residential, commercial, and industrial customers.

The subtext is political triangulation: rate hikes are cast as the downstream consequence of choices someone made - regulators, environmental rules, utilities, rival parties - without naming a culprit in the sentence itself. That omission is strategic. It lets the speaker pivot to whatever villain the moment requires, from “overregulation” to “lack of domestic energy production,” while keeping the public emotionally anchored to the same takeaway: you’re paying more, and it’s not your fault.

Contextually, the post-2000 era includes natural gas volatility, grid reliability spending, wildfire hardening in the West, renewable integration costs, and inflationary cycles - any of which can be marshaled as either necessary investment or proof of mismanagement. The quote’s power lies in how it compresses all that complexity into a single, portable grievance.