Energy independence and security are basic requirements for a stable economy and national security in the modern world. Americans learned that lesson the hard way in the 1970s — even, presumably, President Joe Biden.
Yet since Biden has been president, he has done everything in his power to wreck American energy independence and security. And more is coming. What gives?
A brief overview of recent U.S. energy history is in order. (RELATED: President Biden’s Magical Thinking On Rising Gasoline Prices)
Although former President Jimmy Carter was largely a failure as president, he did do at least one thing right. To cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Carter and Congress unleashed the U.S. coal industry through the National Energy Act of 1978. Coal replaced oil as a means of generating electricity. By the time of the Obama administration, the production of coal had doubled to generate more than 50% of our electricity.
Then the Obama climate agenda struck.
Although climate legislation failed in Congress during 2009 and 2010, former President Barack Obama weaponized his EPA against the coal industry, cutting the use of coal to generate electricity back to about the Carter administration level. What kept our country from energy disaster during the Obama years was the concurrent rise of fracking, which provided the natural gas to replace the lost coal generation.
Although Obama was no fan of fracking, he was happy to allow it as a practical means of facilitating his war on coal. But fracking wasn’t going to be allowed forever as Hillary Clinton only viewed it as a “bridge fuel” to a fossil fuel-free future.
The election of President Donald Trump paused the Democrat war on fossil fuels. Although Trump couldn’t do much for the coal industry except to stop the government assault on it, he removed the threat of government action against fracking, which resulted in a world-changing record amount of U.S. oil and gas production.
Under Trump, the U.S .rather than OPEC dominated the global oil market — so much so that, in early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, a Russia-Saudi Arabia oil production war resulted in the price of oil briefly going negative. America’s energy independence was secure, gasoline was cheap and the economy was strong.
Enter Biden — and disaster. (RELATED: More Magical Thinking: President Biden’s Offshore Wind Fantasy)
Since Biden has been president, he has done everything in his power to wreck American energy independence and security in the name of his climate agenda. On day one, he killed the Keystone XL pipeline and stopped new oil and gas drilling on federal lands. His Environmental Protection Agency went to war against fracking by revoking fracking-friendly Trump reforms. Oil and gas industry investment was chilled while energy demand picked up as the pandemic shutdowns eased. Gasoline prices began their steep climb.
The Biden administration virtually cheered higher gas prices as a necessary condition for advancing its climate agenda. While Biden claimed he was doing everything possible to reduce gas prices, for example, by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the amounts released were in fact trivial and had no effect on gasoline prices. Biden then falsely accused the oil industry of price gouging and sitting on 9,000 unused oil leases on public lands. (RELATED: ANALYSIS: White House Keeps Misleading Public On Oil, Gas Leasing. Here Are The Facts)
And as if all that was not bad enough, the Biden administration continues to do everything it can to block and discourage fossil fuel production and transportation.
The Democrat dominated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued rules to block new pipelines on the basis of climate. The Biden administration recently rolled back Trump reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act to make it easier for green groups to block fossil fuel projects on public lands. And the Biden EPA plans to step up the war against fossil fuels in the coming months with pointlessly stringent air quality rules that will give EPA power over every aspect of fossil fuel production, transportation and use.
The goal of these Biden policies is to drive fossil fuel prices permanently higher, in hopes of forcing Americans to embrace even higher-priced wind, solar and electric vehicle technologies.
This is a policy of chaos for our economy and national security. Unless Congress can muster the necessary votes to put an end to these Biden policies, we will be stuck with them until at least 2025.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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