Will rising oil and gas prices ultimately just benefit the fossil fuel industry, or will it move us toward alternative energy? Who knows? It could go either way from here.
Here is what I do know. Republlicans refuse to budge from “drill baby drill.” They are striving mightily to hang rising gas prices around President Biden’s neck, even though there’s not a whole lot he can do about them (and what little he can do, he’s trying to do). At the same time, they are ignoring wholesale the need to invest in other energy technology. Instead, they are taking advantage of the moment to gaslight the nation about oil.
For example, according to Paul Waldman, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently said “President Biden’s Green New Deal destroyed our energy surplus and it turned it into an energy crisis.” I haven’t found this quote elsewhere; she may have said this at the recent CPAC convention. But it’s an astonishing thing to claim for a bill that was never even voted on, much less became law, and which I don’t believe President Biden supported. Just saying the words “green new deal” causes oil deposits to dry up, apparently.
Of course, nobody can beat the former guy when it comes to stupid.
OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022
At Mother Jones, Chris D’Angelo lists The GOP’s Four Biggest Lies About Joe Biden and Fossil Fuels. They are:
1. The administration “destroyed” our energy industry
2. Biden “ended” oil and gas drilling on federal lands
3. Biden “shut off” the Keystone XL pipeline
4. Biden “destroyed American energy independence”
And, they are indeed all lies, as D’Angelo explains. But here’s the money quote:
The GOP campaign to blame Biden for both Russia’s war and high gas prices has included misleading statements and outright falsehoods, as well as circulating lists of demands that closely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry. It is being led by some of Washington’s largest beneficiaries of industry campaign donations. And it comes on the heels of the latest dire climate report from the United Nations, which warns that the window for reining in greenhouse gases in order to “secure a livable and sustainable future” is rapidly closing.
Recently White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shot down questions about Biden’s alleged refusal to allow oil companies to drill by noting that the oil companies are sitting on 9,000 approved drilling permits that are not being used. D’Angelo continues,
The goal, of course, is to leverage the crisis in Eastern Europe to provide more access and regulatory relief to an oil and gas sector that is already very profitable, heavily subsidized, has enormous sway in Washington, and is sitting on unused permits to drill across millions of acres of land and water. …
… In reality, the US produced more oil and gas during Biden’s first year in office than during Trump’s, and crude oil output is forecast to reach a record high in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
And the other goal is to undermine the Biden Administration, because they’d rather see the U.S. fail during a time of crisis than pass up an opportunity to bash Democrats.
Now, Mike Pence’s PAC is running a television ad with this voiceover:
“Before Russian bombs began to rain on Ukraine. Before hundreds of innocent Ukrainians lost their lives. A horrific decision had already been made. Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence on Russian oil, endangering America’s security
Do read all of Glenn Kessler’s fact check of the ad, and other Republican talking points. Here is more about the ad:
Text appears at one point: “U.S. reliance on Russian oil hits record high.” And then another text appears: “U.S. ‘paying Putin to invade’ Ukraine.” That is attributed, oddly, to “Oil analyst, Fox News.” (It turns out to be Stephen Schork, a onetime commodity trader and research analyst who writes a newsletter.)
We’re hearing incessantly about Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, and that’s why oil is so expensive. Kessler:
We’ve written many fact checks on this project over the years, about inflated claims about the number of jobs that would be created and about false assertions that the oil moving through it would bypass the United States. If the pipeline were built, the crude oil would travel to the Gulf Coast, where it would be refined into products such as motor gasoline and diesel fuel, with one estimate that 70 percent of the refined product would be consumed in the United States.
But here’s the rub — despite President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic backing, the pipeline still had not been built, because of court fights and other challenges. So even if Biden had not canceled it, there is little chance it would have been built by now. Biden’s move was more symbolic than anything else. (Moreover, in the past 10 years, the production of oil from tar sands has doubled, by more than what the Keystone XL would have carried, and it is ferried by other pipelines and by railroad.)
The most common complaint you get is that President Biden somehow kneecapped our energy industry by canceling new federal oil and gas leases. However, Kessler writes,
Biden did announce a halt to any new federal oil and gas leases shortly after taking office. But The Washington Post reported that in his first year, Biden outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands — in part because a federal judge last June struck down Biden’s executive order. So the administration resumed leasing, to the dismay of environmentalists.
Paul Waldman thinks the Ukraine war could take us backward on global warming. He writes,
In recent years as the climate crisis has intensified, opinion in the Republican Party on the subject has been divided into three camps. In one are those who sincerely want to do something about climate change, even if their proposals are relatively modest. At the other extreme are active climate deniers, who are a significant, if dwindling, portion of the party.
The largest group of Republicans is those who will reluctantly acknowledge that climate change is real, but don’t think we should do anything about it. While they don’t frame it this way, their actual position winds up being that we should make climate change worse by burning as much fossil fuels as possible while not moving in any active way to shift toward renewable energy.
This is maddening. For all their incessant whining about energy dependence, Republicans (and a couple of Democrats) never fail to put the brakes on doing the one thing that will free us from having to deal with the likes of Putin or Mohammed bin Salman — investing in alternative energy technology.
Waldman tells us that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed a bill intended to discourage people from installing solar panels on their homes in the Sunshine State. As I understand it, the new law puts big restrictions on net metering, which is the ability for a homeowner to send unused energy back to the power company for credit. Without net metering, it’s expected fewer people will bother installing solar panels. Waldman continues,
The net metering bill was basically written by Florida Power and Light. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald showed that its lobbyist delivered the text to the state senator who would introduce it in the legislature; two days later FPL’s parent company also delivered a $10,000 contribution to her PAC.
See also Jeff Goodell, Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees at Rolling Stone.
As Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovka put it in remarks during an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forum held (coincidentally) as Russian soldiers marched over the border: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels.”
The urgency of the climate crisis was underscored by the latest IPCC report, which, with doomsday levels of irony, was released the same week that Putin invaded. “The rise in weather and climate extremes,” the report notes, has already led to “irreversible impacts.” Heat waves have become more extreme, droughts deeper, wildfires more frequent, sea levels are rising faster. These changes are “contributing to humanitarian crises” that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. So far, the feeble attempts to adapt have been pathetically inadequate and “focused more on planning rather than implementation.”
What else is new?
Predictably, Republicans and their corrupt band of climate crooks and deniers immediately used the invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, not free ourselves from it. They willfully ignored the simple truth that there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world than with oil, gas, and coal. To them fossil fuels are the energy equivalent of testosterone. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that Biden’s “war on American oil and gas” made Putin stronger. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Fox News that “from the very day [Biden] got into the White House, he gave Putin all the power.”
Goodell writes that the battle of economic power is shifting away from the fossil fuel and toward renewable energy. That may be more apparent in Europe than the U.S., because I’m not seeing that here.
The Democrats need to go on offense against this garbage, and they need to do it yesterday.
