Biden’s climate czars

On Day One, Biden moved to rejoin the Paris climate accord and revoked the required federal permit for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. A week later, he also imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands.

To be sure, Biden did restore the international abortion funding eventually, on Jan. 28. But it’s no coincidence that climate change came first. This is, after all, the age of the Green New Deal. No climate plan can be too alarmist, too poorly conceived, too extreme, or too expensive to prevent six Democratic senators who are running for president from co-sponsoring it.

It was significant that Biden felt a need to put Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, champion of the Green New Deal, on his campaign’s working panel on climate policy. Biden, one of the few Democratic candidates to avoid the proposal, needed to make amends. He had established himself as the more centrist candidate in the primaries; now, he had to avoid dimming the ardor of the activists, who pay close attention to such details.

This comes at a cost: All of these policies stand to create more problems than they solve (a low bar, perhaps, since they won’t solve any).

For example, the killing of Keystone will actually increase carbon emissions, albeit slightly. The pipeline would have obviated the shipping of oil from western Canada by train and boat; now, that same oil will make the long trek to China on carbon-spewing vehicles. Meanwhile, 190,000 miles of existing pipelines will continue moving liquid petroleum products across the United States without interruption.

Biden’s temporary freeze on federal leases won’t change much unless it becomes a permanent one. But even then, it will not stop consumers or utilities from burning gasoline, coal, diesel, or any other fossil fuel to meet whatever demand exists. Any longer moratorium, however, might just bankrupt a few western state governments.

New Mexico, a state governed by Democrats, represents the most extreme case, dependent upon its share of royalties from drilling on federal lands for 39% of its general fund revenue. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who reportedly turned down an appointment in Biden’s administration, reacted to the action with criticism, albeit far too mild considering what was at stake. New Mexico is already a poor state with higher taxes than its neighbors; it won’t be able to fill such a large hole in its budget by squeezing its tax base.

As for the Paris accord, its effectiveness can be summed up in one statement: The U.S., a nonparticipating nation under President Donald Trump, led the world in absolute carbon emissions reductions during his term in office.

This last point is worthy of emphasis. The purveyors of the alarmist version of climate change advised Biden’s campaign on energy and the environment and now occupy his administration. These are not people prone to optimism. They cannot accept the idea that things got better without their help or input, or that the world might not end after all if we haven’t given up on fossil fuels within 12 years.

But the Trump-era emissions reductions were real. Already by 2019, the U.S. under Trump had reached emissions levels lower than at the start of the Clinton era. Over 29 years, the U.S. economy had grown 55% larger, all the while using 42% less energy and emitting just 2% more carbon dioxide. And that was before the black swan year of 2020 ushered in an abrupt 11% decline in carbon emissions, to levels well below those of 1990.

Pandemic aside, the last decade’s healthy trend of carbon reduction can be attributed mostly to the rise of fracking. By bringing natural gas prices to their modern lows in 2020, fracking has caused coal, which emits twice as much carbon per unit of energy, to fall out of favor as the electricity-generating fuel of choice. Coal is now responsible for less than a quarter of electricity production and falling; natural gas is up to 40% and rising.

Fracking has already reduced carbon emissions more than all the combined activism in the history of the modern environmental movement. The environmentalists are not amused.

As a happy byproduct, fracking has also created immense wealth and high-income jobs. It has made the U.S. energy independent, and thanks to the potential for gas exports overseas, it has impeded Vladimir Putin’s ability to bully Europe and dominate his region without pushback.

In the old days, before Democrats had lost their minds over Trump, Obama enjoyed enough wiggle room to show some common sense on the issue of oil and gas production. By coincidence, his administration had presided over a technological revolution that he was smart enough to support, at least superficially. Some Republicans even accused him of trying to take credit for modern fracking. He was still doing it as recently as 2018.

“American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” Obama said. “And you know that whole suddenly, America’s like the biggest oil producer? That was me, people.”

As the famous saying goes, personnel is policy. And despite his reputed moderation and his stated desire to unite the country, Biden has placated the environmentalist Left by surrounding himself in government with radicals who believe that oil and gas should be permanently left untapped, no matter the cost to U.S. domestic prosperity, employment, or foreign policy.

Biden’s pick for EPA director, North Carolina’s top environmental regulator, Michael Regan, exemplified this last July, when he celebrated on Twitter the death of an East Coast gas pipeline that activists had tied up and killed through serial litigation: “Closing the final chapters on #FossilFuel investments in #NC & focusing on #cleanenergy solutions that protect ALL people, our environment, creates thousands of #jobs & cements our leadership in the global economy is the obvious path forward for #NC.”

Note that this pipeline was intended to replace coal power plants in North Carolina and Virginia. It would have created thousands of good-paying construction jobs in those states, too, even while reducing carbon emissions.

But as with Keystone, the prospect of preventing feasible energy production overrides whatever inconvenient details there might be. Both Biden and his green czars mouth the language of “green jobs,” never letting on that this is code for replacing good-paying jobs in oil, gas, and construction with low-paying jobs in solar and wind manufacturing — jobs currently done in China, which would likely still be done there if the U.S. were to abandon fossil fuels overnight.

Maggie Thomas, chief of staff of Biden’s new Office of Domestic Climate Policy, is not exactly a household name. But as a non-politician who came up in climate activism before advising green politicians, she lacks their personal motives to deceive and obfuscate. Asked by podcaster Jason Jacobs last June what role gas will play in the short term, medium term, or long term, the former policy adviser to Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Elizabeth Warren stated flatly, “There is no role for natural gas.” In her view, all that is required is for the federal government to “make large-scale investments” in green energy. Using only existing technology, she promised 90% clean U.S. energy by 2035, all without higher electricity prices or any other trade-offs for that matter.

This is not just an extreme position but an impossible one. In the absence of electrical storage technologies that don’t exist and may never be practical on the required scale, solar and wind power require backing by fuels that can be delivered consistently, such as natural gas, coal, fission, and perhaps, someday, nuclear fusion. The wind doesn’t always blow; the sun doesn’t always shine. Even the water doesn’t always flow, as Brazilians learned in 2015 when a drought shut down the hydroelectric power upon which they relied so heavily.

Renewable energy is great when it is economically viable, but it can never be counted on to meet demand for electricity on its own. Note how millions in Texas, which leads the nation in wind electricity generation, lost power for days when unwinterized gas pipelines failed in cold weather. Even before the drama over frozen wind turbines was noticed or commented upon, only a small fraction of the state’s immense wind and solar capacity could be counted on that day to produce any electricity. Even when wind turbines are properly winterized, the wind has to cooperate; often, it does not.

There’s something further about Thomas’s assertion about gas that evinces a primarily ideological rather than practical perspective. It came at a time when the development of carbon-free electricity generation by natural gas was already the subject of some discussion in the public sphere, certainly known among those following these issues. That technology, featured in a La Porte, Texas, demonstration project, is now reportedly not only a reality but a commercially viable one. It has attracted attention from Prince Charles, among others. And in January, it was licensed for use in four new power plants.

Rodney Allam, its British inventor, told Forbes recently, “We’re going to have to use fossil fuels in the future whether we like it or not.” He is right. And if the world really is under immediate threat due to greenhouse emissions, then the shortest, fastest, easiest path to saving the planet is to make the same fuels we already use emit zero carbon.

But to many on the environmentalist Left, the use of gas (and, for backers of the Green New Deal, even carbon-free nuclear power) is almost more offensive than the planet’s imminent destruction.

Biden, like it or not, has to deal with the fact that this is now mainstream thinking in his party. His policy staff is thus replete with anti-energy activists, from bottom to top.

Some of them are known quantities, none more than former Secretary of State and now climate envoy John Kerry. He negotiated the Paris accord in the first place in 2015, sacrificing American interests in favor of China, the world’s largest carbon polluter. Xi Jinping left Paris with a license to keep increasing his nation’s emissions for another 15 years, and indeed, China has done so. It continues to build new coal plants to this day; the New York Times reported in December that some are being financed as part of Xi’s pandemic stimulus policy. And China’s emissions increases in the time since Paris have canceled out U.S. emissions reductions.

Conservatives constantly ask why Kerry went to such lengths in Paris to disadvantage the U.S. against its greatest strategic adversary. But environmentalists should also ask themselves this one: Doesn’t one ton of Chinese carbon pollution imperil the world just as much as a ton of American carbon pollution? Or is the whole point of this thing really just a display of national virtue, rather than a measure intended to avert a “crisis”?

Judging by Biden’s other personnel choices, there will be a new flavor to the focus on global warming. Biden’s inclusion of “environmental justice” advocates indicates that the strategy of racializing carbon emissions is here to stay. Cecilia Martinez will work on “pollution disparities” for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. As Thomas put it in her podcast interview, “There is a long history of environmental racism in America. And I think particularly in light of the tragic murders of innocent black men, like George Floyd, and so many others, this is a time when we should be making that very, very clear connection.” The point is to inject some life into an issue typically ignored by all but white urban gentry liberals by making it into a racial issue instead.

To that same end, another Biden climate adviser, Obama-era EPA Director Gina McCarthy, created a video Jan. 30 calling climate change “an intersectional issue” and “a racial justice issue,” because it “goes after the very same communities that pollution has held back and racism has held back.”

Democratic Rep. Debra Haaland, Biden’s choice for secretary of the interior, is known, among other things, for her strident opposition to any and all pipelines: “It’s time to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure in America — no more pipelines!” she told Netroots Nation in 2018.

She personally participated in the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline from 2016 into 2017. The protesters, a mix of the local Standing Rock Sioux (the pipeline passed within a half-mile of their reservation) and liberal urban gentry from out of state, occupied a plot of land for months, hoping to prevent construction. Most labored under the misconception that this would keep the oil from going to market.

Haaland’s participation in that protest became an issue in her Jan. 23 confirmation hearing. Asked by Sen. John Hoeven whether she supports that pipeline’s continued existence, Haaland offered an incoherent word salad and refused to take a hard position. “I am happy to get briefed on any of these issues if I am confirmed,” she concluded after a rambling non-answer. The prospect of attaining executive branch power apparently shook her confidence on the issue — at least for the purposes of public statements given under oath. 

Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s choice for energy secretary, had sounded a lot like today’s radicals in 2016, presumably angling for a spot in a forthcoming Hillary Clinton administration. “We ought to be doing everything we possibly can to keep fossil fuel energy in the ground and developing the renewable side,” she said at the time, voicing support for the protests against Dakota Access.

At her confirmation hearings for Biden’s administration, however, Granholm took more of a realist, politician’s approach. “If we’re going to get to net carbon zero emissions by 2050,” she said, “we cannot do it without coal, oil, and gas being part of the mix.” So, which is it?

According to an email released by WikiLeaks in 2016, she has wanted the job at Energy ever since she asked for it in 2008. In that email to John Podesta, Granholm boasted about clean-energy projects to which her administration had awarded eight-figure tax breaks. Two of these, United Solar Ovonic and Mascoma (a company establishing a wood-burning electricity generation plant), went out of business shortly thereafter. Her more famous goof came later when she got Obama to phone in to her press event showcasing the Livonia-based battery company A123, which had received a $249 million “advanced battery grant.” The company had promised to hire 3,000 workers, but that didn’t happen. By 2012, it had gone bankrupt, a fact that was used to criticize Obama on the campaign trail that year.

There is one more interesting wrinkle to Biden’s personnel choices. His decision to have former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack reprise his role as agriculture secretary sets up a potential confrontation. Vilsack is a perennial supporter of ethanol mandates like the one currently in place.

Ethanol is one of those rare issues that unite the environmentalist Left and the oil industry in opposition. A major fight that roiled the Trump administration was over granting oil refineries waivers for unrealistic ethanol-blending requirements. Hours before Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency exempted three small refineries whose survival had been threatened by the requirement, but the matter has since been hauled into court.

In dealing with this issue, Trump had to balance farm interests against oil interests. But Biden’s energy and environmental policy staff, despite having no love of ethanol, might find it repulsive to rescue refineries with such exemptions from a biofuel requirement with which it is basically impossible for them to comply.

In the short, medium, and long run, the U.S. economy needs robust domestic energy production. The poorest among us depend upon this most. And fortunately, this energy production is becoming gentler on the environment as time passes.

And perhaps even more, the world needs American energy. Much of it still needs to transition away from coal. And the world’s very poorest, who are known even to burn trash and dung for heat and light, need economically viable sources of energy that do not make them ill. (If there is a racism element to the environment issue, that’s probably it.)

Likewise, those nations most vulnerable to toxic world politics need American energy. The fracking revolution, the recent explosion in American energy production, has provided Europe with a way to liberate itself from Vladimir Putin’s clutches, and it has provided the U.S. with a way to detach itself somewhat from the vagaries of Middle Eastern politics.

With its emissions on the wane and energy exports on the rise, this is just the time for the U.S. to extend its hand to other nations as a shining beacon of diplomacy and commerce. With ever cheaper and ever cleaner natural gas, Americans can make the world a better place without the force of arms. Judging by Biden’s choice of personnel, it seems more reasonable to expect that solution to be left in the ground.

David Freddoso, the New York Times bestselling author of The Case Against Barack Obama, is the Washington Examiner’s online opinion editor.