While many critics of President Biden point to his weakness on the world stage as a large part of the reason Vladimir Putin decided now was the time to invade Ukraine, there's more than just Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and faltering foreign policy to blame.
"The United States was energy dominant, we had more energy production than consumption, more exports than imports, we were the largest producer of oil and gas," explained Marc Morano, author of Green Fraud and executive editor of Climate Depot. Then President Biden was elected and everything changed.
"The president himself is clueless," Morano told Townhall. "What happened was Biden, he had a very bad energy policy, but when he got the nomination he made an unholy alliance with the Green New Deal wing of the Democratic party and that is what has taken over the climate policy" that Morano called "off the charts" bad.
Part of that radical climate contingent is embodied in John Kerry, Biden's climate czar who jets around the world warning other people about pollution. Morano pointed out that during the last week of turmoil and escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine that culminated in Wednesday night's invasion, John Kerry was busy calling for an emergency climate summit.
"John Kerry will tell you with a straight face that climate change is the greatest national security threat we face," Morano noted. "John Kerry has it ass-backwards," he said before pointing out that "the greatest national security threat we may face is their climate and energy policies, not climate change."
As the Biden administration has led the United States down the dangerous path to energy dependence by killing off American energy projects and pipelines, the same ideology espoused by the likes of Greta Thunberg has taken hold in Putin's backyard across Europe.
"The biggest thing that set [Putin] up," Morano explained, "was the European version of the Green New Deal. Europe for years now has been promoting this net-zero energy policy where [they'd] have net zero CO2 emissions, so they've been systematically shutting down fossil fuel production in Europe on the mythical chance that solar and wind can come in and replace it — that hasn't happened." As a result of "green" policies in Europe, 38 percent of their natural gas now comes from Putin and they're "facing an energy crisis far worse than we've been facing here in the United States," Morano added. And while the United States relies less on Russian oil and fuel, America hit an 11-year high for Russian oil imports in 2021. "What's happened in Europe, they've shot themselves in the foot because of this green climate ideology," Morano said.
Thanks to Europe's embrace of Green New Deal policies and the Biden administration policies gutting American energy production, "we've enriched Vladimir Putin," Morano told Townhall. Because the United States and Europe have created oil and gas scarcity while countries like Russia haven't played by the same "green" rules, our foes like "Russia, OPEC, China, Iran, Venezuela, all these hostile regimes" have more power and wealth than the free world. "So that's how we're funding Putin," Morano explained. "His economy's growing, he has the power to put Europe into a deep recession by withholding energy."
Morano says that these real-world results of "green" policies are not a failure of the policy or an unintended consequence, this is exactly what the Green New Deal crowd wants to see happen. "They want to shut down fossil fuels, well this is the result. You have people who don't follow this ideology, and they become the power brokers."
With power over Europe and enrichment due to America's embrace of radical environmental policies, Russia might not even be the main event in the rebalancing of global power. "Russia is just an appetizer when it comes to national security affairs over the Green New Deal agenda," Morano told Townhall. "China is the real one. We have traded energy independence and dominance for now reliance on Chinese [products]. 90 percent of our solar panels come from there."
"This is what we're facing: We've empowered the outlaws of the world, the hostile regimes, to have an inordinate amount of power and we've weakened ourselves," he added.
As for the kind of sanctions NATO threatened and Biden announced earlier on Thursday, Morano said the power has already been accumulated by Putin and "it's just irrelevant at this point. If Russia really wants to play hardball, they can start cutting off energy and tank the economies of Europe. I don't think Russia is that concerned right now and I think they're going to go full-steam ahead," he added. "No diplomatically strong worded letter from the Biden administration is going to change anything."