How Much Damage To America Can Biden Do With His Energy Plan?

Just a couple of months ago I had a post titled “The Biden Energy Plan Is A Joke.” Key excerpt: “In any rational world, a candidate proposing the energy plan that Joe Biden has proposed for the United States would be laughed out of the race for President on that ground alone.”

Yet there was Joe in his “victory” speech a few days ago making this ridiculous claim: “America has called upon us to . . . [fight] the battle to save our planet by getting climate under control.”

Really? In truth, there’s only one thing we can say for certain about Biden’s plans for energy, which is that they will have no effect whatsoever on the earth’s climate, at least none that can be measured. Even if you believe that human CO2 emissions are having a catastrophic effect on the climate (they aren’t), and even if you believe that the U.S. can somehow achieve drastic reductions in its piece of those emissions (it can’t), the fact remains that the U.S. provides only about 14% of world emissions. Meanwhile, ongoing increases in emissions from developing countries will continue to swamp any modest decreases that the U.S. might hope to achieve. Since the generally-used base year of 1990, while U.S. and European CO2 emissions have remained steady or declined modestly, global emissions have gone from about 22 Gt to 38Gt per year. Those huge increases come from the developing world, and global emissions are going to go right on increasing as places like China, India and Africa bring electricity, air conditioning and automobiles to their citizens. If you think that those places agreed in the Paris Agreement to reduce their emissions, you are wrong — they did not; nor did they agree to stop ongoing increases.

So everything that Biden proposes for the U.S. on the energy front is an exercise in total futility. But just because this is total futility does not mean that it cannot be enormously damaging and destructive to American wealth and prosperity, let alone national security. On a more positive note, Biden is likely to be facing an uncooperative Congress, particularly the Senate, which will limit how much damage he can do.

A couple of sources have compiled lists of what Biden says he is going to do. At Conservative Journal, they have a list of ten proposed executive orders that Biden says he is going to sign on “day one.” At Watts Up With That on November 12, Tilak Doshi goes through some of the more consequential provisions of Biden’s so-called “climate crisis action plan.”

Doshi first notes that Biden’s plan is to spend on this some $1.7 trillion on this in four years — quite a tidy sum to accomplish absolutely nothing. It sure is a good thing that we now have infinite resources. What’s in the plan?

The . . . Biden Plan . . . includes banning fracking in federal lands and waters, denying federal permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and ensuring 100% clean renewable energy by 2035 in electricity generation, buildings, and transportation.

I like that last part about 100% “renewables” in electricity generation by 2035. That’s fifteen years from now. We’re well more than fifteen years — more like forty years — into the project of heavily subsidizing wind and solar to generate electricity, and after all that time and effort, those sources are up to providing us with about 9% of our electricity as of 2019. Even that 9% only works because there is 100% fossil fuel (or nuclear) backup at all times. And as of today, almost none of the energy for our transportation sector, and almost none of building heat, or our energy for industry or agriculture, comes from wind or solar via electricity. Are we about to embark on a crash program of shuttering our hundreds of perfectly good, functioning, non-obsolete, cheap fossil-fuel electricity plants and replacing them with thousands of heavily-subsidized wind turbines and solar panels that only provide electricity part time? I have my doubts that Biden can accomplish much of this at all. But don’t forget that this is the strategy that has gotten Germany to electricity rates about triple ours with very modest reductions in CO2 emissions.

Banning fracking “on federal lands”? How does that make any sense? If fracking is evil, shouldn’t it be banned everywhere; and if not evil, shouldn’t it be allowed everywhere? Back during the Obama years, Barack did his best to stifle fracking by obstructing it on federal lands; but the fracking technology revolution mainly took place during Obama’s watch, and on private lands. Nonetheless, a fracking ban on just federal lands can do substantial economic damage. For example, Doshi points out that the state of New Mexico, run by Democrats, “depends hugely on oil and gas production on federal lands.”:

[W]ill the oil and gas workers in that state be sacrificial lambs for the global climate cause? An analysis by the state’s oil and gas association projects New Mexico to be among the states potentially hardest hit by a Biden presidency, losing over 62,000 jobs by 2022.

Then there is the prospect of a Biden administration blocking fossil fuel infrastructure projects, such as pipelines. Doshi:

[A] politicized Environmental Protection Agency under Biden would block oil and gas pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure by enabling activists to launch interminable legal suits as in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

I guess any new fracked wells will just have to send their product to market by rail. It costs more and is more dangerous, but hey, Biden is blocking the pipelines.

Next we have the Paris Climate Accord, which Biden plans to re-join. In this post back in 2017, I posited that agreement as a basic competency test for a U.S. President. The agreement commits the U.S. to shackle its economy by making substantial cuts to CO2 emissions within a few years, while committing developing countries like China and India to absolutely nothing. The agreement also commits the U.S. to contributing tens of billions of dollars annually to some kind of climate fund for third world kleptocrats that in reality has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with kleptocracy. No one with any degree of competence could possibly agree to this on behalf of the U.S., but remember, this is Joe Biden. I suppose we could just join the agreement and then fail to meet our promised emissions targets. That is what the Europeans are in the process of doing. But Biden seems to take this seriously. If so, massive damage can be done.

Few seem to be discussing the national security implications of the Biden Plan. The whole idea is to restrict U.S. production of fossil fuels, and thereby to increase their prices, and drive usage down. Naturally,. this will put economic power into the hands of all of the world’s worst actors — places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and maybe even Venezuela. Doshi:

The surge in U.S. oil and gas exports which gathered pace in the past decade allowed President Trump to pursue an  “energy dominance” agenda which made the U.S. less vulnerable to political and social upheavals in the Middle East. It increased its foreign policy leverage in achieving strategic objectives, giving the Trump administration greater latitude to support allies and sanction rivals. It made it easier for President Trump to impose export sanctions on oil-producing adversaries such as Venezuela and Iran without the fear of a resulting spike in global oil prices. A Biden presidency committed to the radical decarbonization agenda would undermine these achievements, and in the process, make the US and the rest of the world far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of volatile energy markets and political instability in the Middle East.

That sounds about right to me.

I’m old enough to remember when the leaders of the federal government thought it was their job to facilitate the people in achieving prosperity. Now, it seems that we are shortly to have a President and a bureaucracy firmly committed to impoverishing the American people and undermining their security by making energy less available and driving up its price. And all to accomplish absolutely nothing.