Biden’s Green Road to Ruin

With gas prices skyrocketing, any reasonable President would pull out all the stops to maximize domestic fossil fuel production, but not Joe Biden.  He is fully committed to destruction of America’s fossil fuel industry, the backbone of the American economy, by 2030.

On day 1, Biden issued devastating Executive Orders revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and suspending all new leases for onshore and offshore oil and gas production. In Executive Order 13990 (Jan. 20, 2021), Biden ordered a moratorium on the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program instituted by President Trump, and Biden reinstated Obama’s Executive Order 13754 and Obama’s presidential memorandum of December 20, 2016, prohibiting mineral leasing and oil and gas drilling in Arctic waters and the Bearing Sea.  In Section 6 of EO 13990, Biden revoked the Keystone XL pipeline permit that President Trump granted.  Biden summarily halted over 1,179 miles of pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska whereupon it would connect with two other pipelines already constructed to transport oil to Patoka, Illinois, and Port Arthur, Texas, for refining.

Biden’s actions curtailed domestic oil and gas productionand destroyed American energy independence.  The Keystone XL pipeline would have carried some 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day to America.  In addition to destroying and never replacing (despite Administration promises) the 11,000 jobsdependent on the Keystone XL pipeline permit, Biden’s EO substantially cut the value of all investments made in the pipeline, causing widespread economic injury.  The moratorium on new oil and gas drilling also short changed the market of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day. That moratorium sacrificed hundreds of thousands of jobs in eleven states: Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Utah, Alabama, and Montana.

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As if Biden’s day 1 were not bad enough, the White House ordered every department and agency to make elimination offossil fuels the number one priority.  That led to DOT, DOD, FERC, and EPA orders and rules that impede the functioning offossil fuel markets.  Collectively, Biden’s federal departments and agencies have constructed a regulatory labyrinth that coerces and cajoles companies out of fossil fuel markets.  Biden is to blame for the losses that have ratcheted up inflation at the pump and in all manner of retail sales. 

Biden’s road away from affordable and clean energy to so-called “green” energy is a road not only to economic, but also to environmental ruin.  Perverse effects, such as more frequent blackouts, accompany state mandated shifts in reliance from fossil fuels to wind and solar “renewables.”  Blackouts, frequent in California, have a devastating economic impact, particularly on small businesses.  And, irony of ironies, the only way to fillthe unreliability gaps in service is through ramping up reliance on fossil fuels—from gas and propane generators to back-up fossil fuel-based power plants.

Biden’s promised renewable nirvana is anything but the promised land.  Thirty states have adopted “Renewable Portfolio Standards” compelling utilities to meet government mandated goals for renewable energy.  University of Chicago Economists Michael Greenstone and Ishan Nath discovered that state RPS mandates have resulted in enormous increases in retail energy prices.  The overall retail energy price increase they calculated is staggering.  In the 29 RPS states surveyed, consumers paid a whopping $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have had the government never mandated renewables.

The energy industry classifies solar and wind power as “intermittent sources” because they depend, of course, on the relative availability of sunshine and gusts of wind.  By contrast, fossil fuels have a long history of continuous, reliable energy generation at low cost, far lower than energy from solar and wind systems.

Without constant government subsidies to keep the cost of “renewable” energy down, and without RPS mandates, the renewable market would vanish in favor of tried and true oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power sources.  But what about the environment?

Wind farms remove from productive agriculture and environmental preserves massive acreage.  They also wreak havoc on animals and habitats, particularly bird and bat populations.  The materials used in wind turbines require production that depends on substantial carbon emissions on an ongoing basis.  When turbine blades operate at high speeds, air pressure changes near the blades drawing in bats and birds to their destruction.  To “replace” fossil fuels with wind necessitates millions of turbines, millions of dead birds and bats, and hundreds of thousands of square miles of open land (the size of a half dozen whole states).

Solar panels fare no better but enrich our arch-enemy communist China at the expense of slave labor by captive Muslim Uyghurs.  China is the world’s largest producer of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules.  Solar panels are comprised of highly toxic materials, including rare earth minerals, the extraction of which is a dirty business harmful to the slave laborers.  The toxins are not limited to China, because each solar cell is in effect a toxic landmine.  Solar panels must be replaced from time to time; used panels end up in the environment and yield residues of lead, cadmium, and toxic chemicals.  The glass used in PV modules is also non-recyclable and an environmental threat, riddled with impurities such as plastics, lead, cadmium, and antimony.  To replace domestic fossil fuel sources of energy with solar requires a land grab ofsome 57,000 square miles to accommodate over 15 billion PV solar panels.

The green catastrophe looming from Biden’s radical, forced climate change agenda will certainly destroy the American economy, bringing on recession, if not depression. It will enrich communist China, as never before.  It will harm, not help, the environment.  For all his seeming lack of spatial and temporal awareness, Biden has been an unwavering advocate of a socialist green agenda, despite massive popular outcry against high fuel costs.