Somewhere over the last two years, Joe Biden was clobbered by the reality that the U.S. needs fossil fuels — cheap fossil fuels — to keep the wheels of industry turning and the autos moving.
Unlike his radical green base that thinks the world economy runs on daffodils and unicorns, Biden realized when gasoline at the pump was closing in on $8 a gallon that it might not have been the brightest idea to shut down oil pipelines and shelve oil and gas drilling licenses on federal lands. Despite cheers from greens, the rest of America was ready to pick up their pitchforks and march to the White House with buckets of tar and baskets of feathers.
So Biden is now in full retreat and the green lobby is ready to come after him.
Biden pledged in 2020 to halt new oil and gas development on federal lands — a promise he’s about to break. It’s all part of Biden’s effort to “move to the center,” say pundits. I say it’s an effort to pretend that some other guy named Joe Biden wanted to impoverish Americans by causing gas prices to skyrocket and fuel oil prices to shoot out of sight.
Related: The Economic Case for Net Zero Is Zero
The White House is trying to put lipstick on a pig and claim that it just isn’t so. Only those wishing to be fooled will buy that lie.
A White House official told Politico that under Biden, the U.S. has become a “magnet for clean energy manufacturing and jobs” and that the nation is still on track to meet its emissions goals.
“This approach has not changed — nor will it. Our climate goals are cutting emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net-zero by 2050 — not 2023,” the official said. “That has always meant that oil will continue to be a part of the energy mix in the short-term while we shore up domestic clean energy production for the long-term.”
And that may prove to be a problem for the climate fanatics, who aren’t shy about reminding the president that their support was crucial to his election victory. Of course, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, feminists, queers, and every single other minority group that supported Biden in 2020 are saying the exact same thing.
So maybe the greens just have to wait their turn.
Regardless of the size, any plan would call for drilling oil and building miles of pipelines and roads, a gravel pit, an air strip and other infrastructure in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a 36,875-square-mile patch of federal land in the relatively undeveloped Arctic wilderness. It would produce as much as 600,000 barrels of oil over its three-decade lifetime.
The project would also add nearly 280 million tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere over that period, according to the Interior Department’s environmental analysis. That would be the equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants to the U.S. electricity system every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions calculator.
How desperate are the greens to get Biden to reverse his position? Natural Resources Defense Council spokesperson Anne Hawke has reached out to the queen of climate drama, Greta Thunberg, for help.
Dear @GretaThunberg –
In just days, the US will approve a massive oil project in Alaska.
Can you help us tell US @POTUS to #StopWillowProject?
We need to prevent permitting of this carbon bomb. It would lock-in fossil fuels for decades to come.
Please help shut it down!
— Anne Hawke (@AnneEHawke) March 11, 2023
Help us, Obi Wan Thunberg. You’re our only hope.
What this bruhaha over one fossil fuel development proves is that we can only be as “green” as we can afford to be. When oil and gas are plentiful and cheap, going green only looks quixotic and eccentric. But when you propose policies that will make already expensive fossil fuels in short supply cost even more and become harder to pull out of the ground, that’s just plain stupid.
