As author Joan Didion said, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
That is, of course, Democratic control.
Two years since the 2024 elections and polling is suggesting that anyone who consumes fossil fuels — all of us — is headed for trouble. This is especially true in the oil and gas industry where election year wins by liberal firebrands means fracers and drillers like me will return to working under the heel of the most senselessly irrational of all Democratic policy. That is, energy.
New York’s fracking ban leaves tens of billions of dollars in the ground while 25% of all children in New York City are born into poverty. California has enormous oil and gas reserves but instead of self-supplying, it imports 75% of its oil, with 30% of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz. At great cost, our Navy is now protecting that oil, while back home, California continues to thumb its nose at the industry while passing on some of the best paying jobs in America. It also has the highest gasoline taxes in the U.S. The result, $6.15 gas compared to Texas’s $3.75. Back in 2022, when the current Massachusetts governor was its AG, she was celebrating her role in blocking two natural gas pipelines into her state.
Four years later, she has about-faced and is demanding that Trump speed up permitting for a new natural gas pipeline. That’s to her credit, yet the fact remains that green initiatives account for one-third of Massachusetts’ utility bills. Then there’s the rest of New England, conjoined in the ideological absurdity of burning heating oil in boilers and furnaces because of an inconceivably illiterate aversion to clean burning natural gas. In Maine alone, 55% of its households are still burning oil.
It’s hard to forget the folly of Jen Psaki, the White House Press Secretary under Biden, telling the oil and gas industry we had enough leases. This was in defense of her boss’s illegal suspension of federal oil and gas lease auctions. Ridiculous given that oil is priced on supply and demand and shutting down leasing results in a supply squeeze. Therein lies the rub. Climate activists want to kill before they replace. Foresight is always lost to fervor. Had the Supreme Court not stepped in, drilling would have stopped as leasing is endless given the patch-like nature of assembling a drilling unit. Killing drilling was the unstated goal—the part that’s purposefully left unsaid—the knife’s edge of liberal policy.
Recall the $7.5 billion program set aside in 2021 for EV charging stations. Instead of the thousands of stations that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised, the total to date is 226. That kind of ineptitude is peanuts compared to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and related EPA rules. $1.7 trillion was piled onto taxpayers in programs that haven’t yet moved the needle on atmospheric CO2.
No doubt, oil and gas pollute, but depending on the timeline of sampling, so do nuclear, wind, and solar. Add in battery production, where toxicity is present from cradle to grave, and you have the stark truth. There is no form of energy that doesn’t pollute.
Oil and all its byproducts will resettle. But with a return to the past, we’ll once again have the conflagration of capital typical to Biden, Obama, Hochul, and Newsom’s policies. Democrats used to be for the people, but this subset is impoverishing its constituents in the name of climate. The hard left seems to believe the only good use for fossil fuels is to incinerate businesses, churches, and government buildings with little mind paid to the working poor, a fact worth remembering come election day.
This article originally appeared at RealClear Energy
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The post Don’t forget the Biden administration’s energy policy was first published by the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.
