Dems getting energy wrong

 Real Clear Energy:

Thus far in 2022, political actors and their acolytes are dusting off, again, every bad idea that has ever permeated political debate in the United States regarding energy. Among them:

• Price caps, which do nothing to provoke demand response or salient investment.

• Export bans, which only shrink the global supply pie, worsening price pressures.

• Tapping strategic oil reserves, originally reserved for emergencies – a tactic too often deployed to manage or attempt to manage prices.

• Appealing to OPEC (and OPEC+) to open spigots while also investigating and/or invoking sanctions against, and/or attempting to legislate against, OPEC.

None of these are new, or even clever, or even useful, but they are being presented to voters here and abroad as such.

Allow us to suggest a simple fix.

To the fearful leaders in our country: step out on your turf and support the domestic oil and gas industries in ways that will build investor confidence and calm markets. There simply is no other way to meet the future without a strong domestic base for energy and materials. Others will take note, including troublemakers we face now and those we’ll face in the future.

There is a persistent lack of comprehension of the global oil and gas businesses and underlying economics and dynamics that drive them – and a deteriorating awareness of what it takes to provide oil and natural gas and achieve some reasonable balance in global markets.

Activists and policymakers are so anxious to move beyond hydrocarbons that they have lost any understanding about what the fossil-fuel industry does for a living. They are ignorant of the sheer contradictions between aligning against fossil fuels while supporting widely espoused values like “affordable” energy.

We could say the same about critical minerals, which underlie every green imperative. Awareness is equally lacking when it comes to what the mining and beneficiation businesses and materials science, chemistry, and engineering clusters do for a living every day.
...

If we are not drilling and producing domestic fossil fuels were making our energy supplies less reliable and affordable.   

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