Biden's counter productive energy policy

 Breitbart:

So Joe Biden went there. To borrow a phrase, he said the green part out loud. On November 4, he pronounced of coal plants, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America.” Immediately, the Republican National Committee tweeted, “Joe Biden celebrates coal plant workers losing their jobs.”  Then Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) fired back in defense of his state, and the White House then backtracked, albeit in a grudging way, saying that Biden’s comments had been “twisted.” In point of fact, they weren’t twisted at all: Biden was quite specific in his comments about the defects of coal. As he said on the 4th:

I was in Massachusetts about a month ago on the site of the largest old coal plant in America.  Guess what? It cost them too much money. They can’t count. No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it.

We can surmise what happened. Biden was in Massachusetts, got a dose of green propaganda (beyond what he hears at the office every day), and then said it out loud. But voters were paying attention, so it blew up–and so Biden’s words were blown away. But then on November 6, Biden blew up again, saying, “No more drilling. There is no more drilling.”

Since the recent midterm elections, which Biden clearly regards as a vindication for his approach, he’s been  at it again. Asked by a reporter at the White House if he planned to do anything differently in the next two years, he answered, “Nothing.” Then he flew (by carbon-fuel-burning jet) to the COP27 climate change conference in Egypt to declare, “It’s more urgent than ever that we double down on our climate commitments” on climate change. Indeed, he rededicated his “urgency of the need to transition the world of its dependence on fossil fuels.” Take that, West Virginia! (And Texas, Wyoming, and on and on.)

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On October 19, President Joe Biden patted himself on the back for bringing down gasoline prices, but added, with a tone of threat in his voice, “they’re not falling fast enough.” The Biden administration has, indeed, been jawboning the oil companies on prices, trying to cajole them down.  And on October 31, Biden took his rhetoric up a notch, accusing the oil companies of “war profiteering””

Yet since angry words from the president haven’t been working well enough to cut prices (no surprise), the administration has continued with another midterm-election-minded strategy: emptying out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). This unprecedented politicization of the SPR led former Texas governor and U.S. energy secretary Rick Perry to declare, “It is unacceptable for the Biden administration to use our emergency oil reserves as a political tool to temporarily lower gas prices ahead of the election.”

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Yet the facts of energy rebut the demagoguery. Today, U.S. oil production is down about ten percent from its peak under former president Donald Trump.  And while U.S. natural gas production is up slightly, the curve of increase has flattened.  It’s plain as day that American energy production has been stifled, and this at a time when it’s much needed.

That’s because oil and gas imports to the West from another big producer, Russia, have been all but eliminated by the Ukraine War. Which is why energy prices in Europe went parabolic, bankrupting venerable companies. In such a situation, a sellers’ market, one would expect producers to produce more. And that would be happening, except for two things: the Biden administration’s foreign policy, and its domestic policy.

On foreign policy, Biden went to Saudi Arabia in July to ask the Saudis to increase production, thereby pushing down prices. And yet even the Main Stream Media had to admit that the trip was a bust for Biden.  It seems that his long-expressed hostility to Saudi Arabia—back in 2019, he called it a “pariah”—has poisoned the U.S.-Saudi relationship, at least for as long as Biden is in the White House. Indeed, in the wake of Biden’s visit, the oil kingdom actually cut production. Oof. The anti-woke investor-activist Vivek Ramaswamy sums it up: “The U.S. President goes hat-in-hand begging foreign dictators to produce more oil when we could simply be doing more of it right here at home.”

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That’s exactly right.  We could be producing more energy here at home, but we’re not. Why not? Because Biden chose to put “green” ahead of not only “national prosperity,” but also, “national security.”

In the words of free-market-minded observer Steve Milloy, “The most effective action to counteract the cut in Saudi oil production would be to ease the regulatory burden and offer unabashed support for the American oil and gas industry…. But Biden won’t do so.”

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Biden believes something that is not sol  He seems to think that Big Green can replace fossil fuels.  He may wish that to be so, but it will never happen.  Wind and solar are too unreliable and batteries to make them reliable are beyond the reach of current technology and resources.  His other mistake is believing the left's BS about climate change.  He believes the same folks who have been serially wrong in their predictions of global warming for decades.  They are the same people who said that the poles would be ice-free by now and that coastal cities would be underwater by now.  Neither is remotely happening.  

Biden's Big Green fantasies are a bigger threat to the US economy and national security.