Biden's pander to the climate kooks

 Telegraph:

If you’ve been wondering how much lower the Biden White House would go to appease their climate alarmist funder base leading up to November’s election, the President and his advisors provided an answer last week.

The New York Times and others reported on Wednesday that the White House was planning to announce it would pause permitting approvals for Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) project planned in Louisiana. On Thursday evening, the White House issued a statement formalising that plan, expanding it to apply to all proposed new LNG projects still seeing federal permits.

The announcement of course attributes the need for this move to the climate emergency, with the White House justifying their decision as part of an “evolving understanding of the market need for LNG, the long-term supply of LNG, and the perilous impacts of methane on our planet”.

Reports have circulated in the US media for weeks now that climate activists who provide so much of the Democratic party’s funding base have been applying pressure on the White House to make this move. Bill McKibben lauded the action in the Wall Street Journal: “With this decision, President Biden – who already can claim to have done more to bolster clean energy than any of his predecessors – has also done more to check dirty energy, halting the largest fossil fuel expansion in history”.

Biden’s green credentials are touted for a reason: in reaction to increasingly dismal polling figures, the president is desperate to shore up support from climate hawks ahead of November. The White House couldn’t help but make a dig at Biden’s likely rival, stating that “while MAGA Republicans willfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis, condemning the American people to a dangerous future, my Administration will not be complacent. We will not cede to special interests.”

What else is this move, other than a concession to special interests?

Biden’s reckless actions will cause a shockwave in the global energy market similar to that of an economic sanction, even as much of Europe depends on increasing volumes of US LNG needed to fuel its struggling economy and industrial base. Rather than providing principled leadership, the president has signaled that he is more than willing to abandon his allies when personally politically advantageous.

The positive news is that the US LNG industry has a variety of new LNG projects already under construction that will add as much as 12 bcf/day of export capacity by the end of 2027. Those projects appear unlikely to be hampered by this action, though there can be no guarantees the administration will not make a move on those as well. Witness Biden’s act on January 21, 2021 to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline despite the fact that the pipeline’s developer, TC Energy, had already invested $8 billion in it.

But even if those projects already underway remain unmolested by this latest authoritarian action by the Biden White House, the concern remains that this pause in approval action today will create a pause in additional needed new expansion post-2027. Such a pause at that time could result in untold hardships on nations that are supposedly American allies.
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There is no "climate emergency."  The climate has varied from time to time long before there was widespread use of fossil fuels.   Maybe it is just me, but I find the climate pretty nice these days.  It is sunny and 62 right now outside my window here in Texas.