Since the "Climategate" documents were first leaked, there has been a lot of vigorous debate about the whole climate change debate. To limited effect, sad to say.
What is unlimited, apparently, is the amount of political vigorish that can be extracted from the issue.
You may recall that there's a war going on in eastern Europe, following the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russian forces. They expected Ukraine to roll over quickly — instead, the war's gone on for more than three years now.
The Biden administration talked big but was small helpful. One of their big initiatives was to impose sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports.
Europe, continuing the talking big and acting small pattern, agreed with the sanctions — but kept buying Russian oil and gas. Germany especially had this problem — the Greens had pushed the German government to eliminate nuclear power and push to solar and wind, apparently forgetting that Germany is pretty far north and has relatively little sunshine when it's coldest. So the solution was to, yes, buy power and fuel from Russia.
One thing the US could do is increase liquified natural gas exports to Europe, making it easier for Europeans to get heat and power without buying fuel from Russia. Should be a no-brainer — we have lots, and selling it to Europe would make sense.
Or so you'd think.
Sometimes, however, "think" isn't the first verb to come to mind about the Biden administration. Or, at least, thinking about anything but the next election.
There was actually a study finished in 2023 saying that the US could increase LNG exports with little or no environmental impact — after all, burning Russian or American gas doesn't make much difference — and it wouldn't affect US prices.
This wasn't what Biden wanted to hear. Fox News reported:
The draft report found that across all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production did not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, nor did it correlate with a strong uptick in energy prices for consumers, Trump administration officials said.
"Secretary Granholm, and Biden White House told Americans that the increase in LNG exports would disproportionately increase prices for American consumers as well as from the environment," an official said.
"And both these claims were refuted in the report that the Biden administration hid from Congress and the American public," the official said.
So what did they do? They buried the inconvenient report, not just refusing to release it, but refusing to provide it to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. After all, there might be a war on, and Russia might be invading a supposed ally — even if it was one with which the Biden family had a complicated relationship — but there was an election to be won and political allies in this country to be placated.
I picked up on this story via a column by Jonathan Turley, who makes this point:
What is most concerning is that our LNG exports help reduce the dependence on Russia and would have decreased the revenues to that country to support its war in Ukraine. However, critics charge that Biden ignored the national security and economic benefits. Supporters note that we still exported a massive amount of LNG.
When the U.S. ramped up exports to Europe, progressive Democrats like Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., went ballistic. This appears to have worked in shelving the study while slowing demands for further increases.
So, when they had the choice of helping Europe and hurting Russia, or making Democrat politicians mad, they chose ...
Guess.
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