My latest at the Daily Caller… featured on Fox News’ Faulkner Focus.
Energy independence and security are basic requirements for a stable economy and national security in the modern world. Americans learned that lesson the hard way in the 1970s — even, presumably, President Joe Biden.
Yet since Biden has been president, he has done everything in his power to wreck American energy independence and security. And more is coming. What gives?
A brief overview of recent U.S. energy history is in order.
Although former President Jimmy Carter was largely a failure as president, he did do at least one thing right. To cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Carter and Congress unleashed the U.S. coal industry through the National Energy Act of 1978. Coal replaced oil as a means of generating electricity. By the time of the Obama administration, the production of coal had doubled to generate more than 50% of our electricity.
Then the Obama climate agenda struck.
Although climate legislation failed in Congress during 2009 and 2010, former President Barack Obama weaponized his EPA against the coal industry, cutting the use of coal to generate electricity back to about the Carter administration level. What kept our country from energy disaster during the Obama years was the concurrent rise of fracking, which provided the natural gas to replace the lost coal generation.
Although Obama was no fan of fracking, he was happy to allow it as a practical means of facilitating his war on coal. But fracking wasn’t going to be allowed forever as Hillary Clinton only viewed it as a “bridge fuel” to a fossil fuel-free future.
The election of President Donald Trump paused the Democrat war on fossil fuels. Although Trump couldn’t do much for the coal industry except to stop the government assault on it, he removed the threat of government action against fracking, which resulted in a world-changing record amount of U.S. oil and gas production.
Under Trump, the U.S .rather than OPEC dominated the global oil market — so much so that, in early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, a Russia-Saudi Arabia oil production war resulted in the price of oil briefly going negative. America’s energy independence was secure, gasoline was cheap and the economy was strong.
Enter Biden — and disaster.
Since Biden has been president, he has done everything in his power to wreck American energy independence and security in the name of his climate agenda. On day one, he killed the Keystone XL pipeline and stopped new oil and gas drilling on federal lands. His Environmental Protection Agency went to war against fracking by revoking fracking-friendly Trump reforms. Oil and gas industry investment was chilled while energy demand picked up as the pandemic shutdowns eased. Gasoline prices began their steep climb.
The Biden administration virtually cheered higher gas prices as a necessary condition for advancing its climate agenda. While Biden claimed he was doing everything possible to reduce gas prices, for example, by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the amounts released were in fact trivial and had no effect on gasoline prices. Biden then falsely accused the oil industry of price gouging and sitting on 9,000 unused oil leases on public lands.
And as if all that was not bad enough, the Biden administration continues to do everything it can to block and discourage fossil fuel production and transportation.
The Democrat dominated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued rules to block new pipelines on the basis of climate. The Biden administration recently rolled back Trump reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act to make it easier for green groups to block fossil fuel projects on public lands. And the Biden EPA plans to step up the war against fossil fuels in the coming months with pointlessly stringent air quality rules that will give EPA power over every aspect of fossil fuel production, transportation and use.
The goal of these Biden policies is to drive fossil fuel prices permanently higher, in hopes of forcing Americans to embrace even higher-priced wind, solar and electric vehicle technologies.
This is a policy of chaos for our economy and national security. Unless Congress can muster the necessary votes to put an end to these Biden policies, we will be stuck with them until at least 2025.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.”
The people pushing this destruction of our energy independence and promoting the facade of “clean” energy are not mentally-well. They either are incapable or unwilling to ever think through the inevitable consequences of what such moves entail. Where are they going to get the electricity to charge all of these electric vehicles?
The entire supply change/production/disposal cycles for the required minerals and elements will generate ecological destruction far dwarfing anything arising from the use of oil and gas based products. These people either are insane or are deliberately trying to bring about our destruction.
Yeah……….
An example of the public misjudging a concrete prediction as being an abstract prophesy??????
George Orwell’s concrete prediction of a real life situation located on planet Earth in 1984 was just 38 years premature.
Apart from that, it is turning out to be too accurate for comfort……….
Not LOL ………..
I think you guys are missing the point. The Presidunce doesn’t really care about the Earth’s temperature. He is fulfilling his orders to get us out of our cars and trucks which provide a high level of freedom.
Ditto for the cost of living in a detached house with a nice lawn and yard for the kids. All that independence HAS to go.
Why do you think they are still ordering us to wear the useless masks? It’s all about forcing us to bend the knee. All of this independence and personal freedom and is anathema to the oligarchs. Even more so the massive number of firearms owned by the good guys out here. Why we could forcibly resist! Quelle horreur!
Then there’s the insane “save Mother Gaia” crowd who want a good 75% of us dead to ‘save the planet’ which, of course is in no danger at all. The oligarchs love that idea because they are generally all insane IMAO.
The basis for the Biden Administration’s energy policy is an application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness under which an “abstract” event is mistaken for a “concrete” event by the argument that is made by a climate model where an event that is “concrete” has a location in space and time but an event that is “abstract” lacks such a location. As it has a location in space and time, an event that is “concrete” is observable. As it lacks a location in space and time, an event that is “abstract” is unobservable. Their observability allows “concrete” events to form statistical population. Their uobservability prevents “abstract” events from forming statistical populations. The argument called “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” is based upon sn application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness under which “abstract” events are treated as if they were “concrete” events in making this argument. The Biden Administration’s energy policy is based upon this mistake.