The Only Thing Joe Biden Doesn’t Want Made in America Is Energy By David Harsanyi
Look on the bright side: The president is so unpopular that Congress is unlikely to pass any of his green-energy policies.
I n his State of the Union address, among a list of moonshots — curing cancer, stopping drug addiction, and so on — President Joe Biden asked Congress to resuscitate his “environmental justice” agenda, arguing that it is the best way to fight rising energy prices and create jobs.
This isn’t merely fantastical, but suicidal. Even if Americans were willing to retrofit society to accommodate hundreds of thousands of windmills and millions of solar panels, even if we could afford the tens of trillions of dollars necessary to implement such a plan, it would basically end U.S. economic superiority.
And sometimes it seems like this is the goal. Biden’s first act as president was to revoke permits to build the Keystone XL, a now-dead 1,700-mile pipeline from Canada. In the executive order, the president claimed that the pipeline “disserves” our national interest and was inconsistent with Biden’s economic and climate imperatives. A week later, Biden signed a slew of executive orders prioritizing climate change over energy production, stopping new oil and natural-gas leases on all public lands.
When asked this week whether the president had miscalculated, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied that the above were “not policies that would address the problem at all.” Of Keystone, she said, it “would take years for that to have an impact on prices.”
This, mind you, is the same administration that addressed the problem by opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and lowering the price of gas by nearly two cents a gallon for a few days.
It’s true that conservatives tend to overestimate the immediate impact that pipelines or drilling would have on prices. Oil is a fungible commodity, which is why the Biden administration hasn’t sanctioned Russia’s crude-oil and refined-fuel industries. But one suspects that had we appreciably increased production and added 800,000 barrels of oil from Canada every day, we’d have better options. We produced around a million fewer barrels of oil per day last year than we did in 2020.
Only a few months ago, Biden was blaming high gasoline prices on corporate greed and the “refusal of Russia or the OPEC nations to pump more oil.” The president was compelled to plead with OPEC — of which Russia is a nonmember with lots of sway — to increase capacity He was rebuffed. Chuck Schumer now says that “we only get 1 percent of any imports from Russia,” also blaming “gouging and monopolies” for price increases. The real number is 8 percent. And we doubled oil imports from Russia last year.
During the State of the Union, Biden also announced that “the United States has worked with 30 other countries to release 60 million barrels of oil from reserves around the world.” That’s three days of oil in the United States.
Indeed, the Democrats’ long-term policy goal is to make fossil fuels more expensive to depress use, while relying on others to drill for us while we paint the countryside with black panels. When asked about expanding U.S. energy production to lower gas prices this week, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted “efforts to increase global oil production” (my italics) because “we are in the middle of a long-term transformation.”
The transition is not economically or societally feasible (or even necessary, though that’s a different story). We spend billions trying to make green energy a thing every year, and have for decades, and we still derive only 12 percent from renewables. And within renewables, only 11 percent is derived from solar, progressives’ favorite energy source that is propped up by mandates and subsidies. Around 63 percent of our renewable energy comes from far more useful geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass sources.
More relevant to Psaki’s comments, however, is that even if a clean-energy economy were possible, it wouldn’t impact prices for many years, either.
As Germany recently found out when it adopted a fanciful green-energy strategy (and denuclearization), it unnecessarily weakened itself and became more susceptible to the vicissitudes of history. The day Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany was getting 50 percent of its coal from Putin, 55 percent of its natural gas, and 35 percent of its oil. So, the lesson Biden takes from this impeding disaster is to further undermine North American production. It’s self-destructive.
Remember that Biden’s promised goal isn’t merely to supplement our portfolio with some more renewables. It entails a “100 percent clean-energy economy” and net-zero emissions no later than 2050. To keep pace with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendations on carbon emissions, and even approach this goal, we would be compelled to lower emissions to Covid-lockdown levels every year for 28 years. That, at the very least, means restrictions on air travel, agriculture, a devastating slowdown in international trade and domestic manufacturing, and a crackdown on modern conveniences. It’s what Malthusian environmentalists call “degrowth.” Very few Americans, as demonstrated by their lifestyle choices, desire this kind of ascetic lifestyle.
And, on the bright side, President Biden is so unpopular that chances of any of his energy policies being passed by Congress are virtually zero.
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