The Biden administration’s push to transform the U.S. economy through overregulation and suppression of oil and gas exploration while heavily subsidizing so-called renewable (and expensive) energy sources, such as wind and solar, not only ignores the key to economic growth (cheap energy) but also plays into the hands of the top threat to the American Republic—the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Let us explore the issue.
Biden’s Energy Policy
President Joe Biden’s energy policy is enshrined in the “Inflation Reduction Act,” a gargantuan $700 billion omnibus bill passed in August 2022. Roughly $369 billion of the total was earmarked for “renewable energy” ($30 billion), utility conversion to green energy ($30 billion), 10 years of subsidies for “energy-efficient” doors and windows, and tens of billions of dollars in green energy transportation “investments,” as noted by The Heritage Foundation. Regarding the latter, President Biden signed an executive order in August 2021 “setting a national goal for zero-emissions vehicles to make up half of new cars and trucks sold by 2030,” as reported by NBC News at the time.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on efforts to lower high gas prices in the South Court Auditorium at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on June 22, 2022. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Furthermore, President Biden completely reversed the Trump administration’s policies that deregulated and incentivized U.S. oil and gas production by canceling the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, placing a hold on new oil and gas leases (adding uncertainty among investors), and ultimately terminating exploration on “protected” federal lands.
The result was a shift from oil and gas exporter to importer in two short years and a spike in gasoline prices at the pump from $2.195 per gallon in December 2020 to $4.444 in May 2022. Before the 2022 midterm elections, the administration was forced to drastically draw down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) by an unprecedented 40 percent to lower prices. The SPR is supposed to be used for emergency and wartime purposes, not for price manipulation during an election cycle.
The overall Biden energy policy objective plays right into the hands of the CCP, which seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s only superpower while concurrently making money off the diminishment of the United States as it pursues a misguided energy conversion from reliable and cheap hydrocarbons to ephemeral, intermittent, and costly “green energy” sources.
The Biden administration is phasing out America’s long-held strengths in oil, natural gas, and gasoline-power vehicle manufacturing while encouraging Americans to invest in green technology and buy electric vehicles that require components that contain rare earth elements.
According to the Financial Times, “China is responsible for the production of about 90 percent of the world’s rare earth elements” and also “at least 80 percent of all the stages of making solar panels and 60 percent of wind turbines and electric-car batteries.”
As reported by Real Clear Wire in August, “Rare earth metals are integral to the magnets key to electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. America is 95 percent net import reliant on such materials, which China produces 70 percent of globally.”
In short, the Biden energy policy gives China economic leverage over the United States over time while drastically increasing energy costs to U.S. businesses, consumers, and the military. That leverage extends further as climate envoy John Kerry supplicates himself to Beijing to persuade China to cooperate on Biden administration policies aimed at emissions reduction in pursuit of the United Nations’s net-zero carbon emissions goals. The communists smile politely while leading the world in the construction of coal-fired energy plants, building six times more than the rest of the world combined.
Pursuit of Green Dreams
On April 23, national security adviser Jake Sullivan disclosed a major shift in global economic guidelines away from consensus policies on “free trade, deregulation, tolerable taxation, and moderate public expenditure” to a top-down, centralized approach in which “the government will set the [economic] agendas ... and that taxpayers will be asked to finance public expenditures [as necessary],” according to a Geopolitical Intelligence Services report. This amounts to moving toward a centralized command economy that has failed everywhere it has been tried, from the former Soviet Union to Cuba to North Korea to communist China.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington on April 24, 2023. Win McNamee/Getty Images
On July 23, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed two new rules that will create enormous strain on the already overburdened U.S. power grid: “a tailpipe emissions standard that would require 60 percent of new cars sold in 2030 to be electric” and a “Clean Power Plan 2.0 [that] is so strict that the only realistic way for many plants to comply is to shut down,” according to RealClearWire.
The EPA claims that neither rule will cause energy reliability problems or increase prices. The electric vehicle mandates will increase demand on the power grid and require substantial investment by utilities in local distribution systems to charge those vehicles.
On Aug. 22, a deal was struck with several eco groups to “protect a whale species” that resulted in new restrictions on oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico: less oil and gas production and increased costs to extract.
On Sept. 7, the Biden administration “canceled the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ... and proposed stronger protections against development on vast swaths of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska,” The Associated Press reported.
On Sept. 8, representatives from the trucking industry reported that proposed new EPA regulations on heavy-duty vehicles and machinery aimed at reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides and other pollutants would be “unattainable,” “result in high inflation and put trucking companies out of business,” and “crush the supply chain and put the American food supply at risk,” according to The Post Millenial.
On Sept. 13, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman testified that a proposed climate disclosure rule for public companies was “no big deal.” To the contrary, the proposed rule would require “public companies to disclose their putative climate risks and greenhouse-gas emissions, including those of suppliers and customers,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The SEC developed the rule with the assistance of climate activist groups such as “Ceres, whose stated goal is to ‘achieve a zero emissions future.’”
On Sept. 15, it was disclosed that the federal government is providing $7.5 billion in tax incentives over five years to Gotion High-Tech Co., a Chinese company that reportedly has ties to the CCP and state-owned financial institutions for a battery production project in Michigan.
On Sept. 18, the administration proposed a 50-year ban on oil drilling and mining on thousands of acres in New Mexico.
Concluding Thoughts
Over the past several centuries, modern civilization and human progress have been based on effectively exploiting hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). Without them, we would be living in cold and dark homes without the modern appliances that make life so much easier than that lived by our forebears. The vast improvement in the wealth and high living standards of Western civilization since the 19th century is due directly to the industrialization made possible by cheap and reliable energy.
It’s axiomatic that “countries that industrialized through increased use of fossil fuels saw not only a surge in economic prosperity, but also benefits such as increased life expectancy, cleaner air, cleaner water, decreased malnutrition, fewer deaths from infectious disease, and fewer climate-related deaths,” as noted by the Foundation for Economic Education.
The Biden administration’s green transformation through top-down mandates will never result in delivering low-cost and reliable energy to homes and businesses because the sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and current energy storage technology can’t meet demand under those conditions.
But the communist Chinese are perfectly happy with the Biden administration’s green energy transformation because they directly benefit in several ways: a continued trade surplus with the United States through direct sales of green technology, increased economic leverage over the United States and its allies, a roiling and chaotic U.S. economy in transition that’s weakened by high inflation, and a weakening of U.S. national security capabilities as taxpayer dollars are diverted from military modernization and readiness to green energy initiatives.
The Biden energy policy could easily be stamped “Made in China.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Stu Cvrk
Author
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.
