Green Dogmatism

On Mar 8, after having suspended oil and gas imports from Russia, Joe Biden blamed rising U.S. fuel prices and shortages on both the situation in the Ukraine and the failure of American energy companies to thoroughly exploit the options available to them. “It’s simply not true,” he said, “that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy productions.” Journalist Drew Holden suggested it was “intellectually disingenuous” for Biden to claim his government had not in any way stifled energy production in the U.S.. Holden, I think, was being kind. Biden’s statement was a brazen lie born either of a criminal disregard for the truth or, more likely, the religious dementia that has come to convince the political Left that it is always right, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

Environmental radicals and their war on fossil fuels are utterly out of touch with the pragmatic demands of the real world. It is a failing common among religious fanatics. As I have said before, the notion that man-made CO2 is leading us to extinction is a theory rather than a fact. This in no way exonerates us from being as responsible as possible in our relationship with Nature. But at the same time those who would quash every new energy project in sight must take into account the human toll of their agenda. On his first few days in office Biden made it very clear that he was among the anointed, cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, suspending a massively promising energy project in Alaska and re-committing the U.S. to the Paris Agreement which Satan, pardon me, I mean Trump, had chosen to abandon because while it severely compromised the economic well being of the U.S., it allowed a host of other countries to continue to pollute with impunity. So devoted were Biden’s Democrats to discouraging the energy sector, that in Sept. of 2021 a number of them sought to put limits on bank loans to any project involving fossil fuels. Yet Biden ludicrously maintains the present fuel crisis in the States has nothing to do with his politics. And while he is distraught that the price of gasoline in the U.S. might seriously compromise his political future, he seems utterly incapable of understanding the stupidity of the uncompromising war on fossil fuels which environmental radicals have been waging for decades now.

Obviously this is far too complex a subject to exhaust here. But a few simple facts which you can research for yourself should serve to illustrate my point.

The consensus among scientists not consumed by bias is that we are decades away from being free of our fossil fuel dependency. This would seem to be a fact eminently worthy of consideration to those shaping our environmental policies.

Ironically, efforts to decrease carbon emissions here in the West by scuttling various energy projects, actually increase global emissions by making us more dependent on foreign nations with no environmental conscience whatsoever. While oil imports from Russia in 2020 had fallen dramatically under Trump, May, 2021, saw Biden’s America import 6 million barrels of Russian crude, this increase clearly his fault and no one else’s.

The European Union, led by Merkel’s Germany, having pursued a radical environmental agenda for some time, depends on Russia for 40% of its natural gas supplies. Strangely, ominously, Putin recently reduced gas exports to Europe by 25%. No doubt planning his invasion of the Ukraine, he was clearly telling his neighbors to the west that if they dared intervene he would cut them off entirely, not only devastating their economies but imperiling the lives of their citizens. Refusing to finance Putin’s military aggression, Germany’s Olaf Scholz put an end to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which would have doubled Russia’s gas imports to Europe. But Nord Stream 1 is still in operation and should Putin decide to shut it down tomorrow, Europe would be devastated.

Canada with its vast supply of Liquid Natural Gas might have helped wean Europe off its dependency on Russia years ago and indeed might help rescue it today were it not for our own cowardly submission to Green Radicals. The Trans Mountain pipeline designed to get Alberta oil to the West coast was held up for years as its impact on both the environment and the Indigenous was thoroughly researched. Having been given permission to proceed, Kinder Morgan was then continuously harassed by protesters, often financed from south of the border, never seriously deterred by provincial or federal authorities, until it finally gave up and sold the project to the Canadian government in 2018 for 4.5 billion dollars. The Crown Corporation in charge recently announced the cost of its completion has swelled from 12.6 to over 21 billion. So what a private firm was fully prepared to build has now become a massive financial burden on the Canadian taxpayer. Of course if you follow contemporary politics you will know such fiscal issues are irrelevant to most on the brain-dead Left.

Now had Ontario under Wynne, in tandem with the government of Quebec, not put a stop to the Canada East pipeline, getting Alberta’s energy products to the Maritimes and then across the Atlantic to Europe would seem a fairly simple affair. As it is, those products must now travel by rail to the west coast where they are loaded on tankers which then proceed to travel thousands of kilometers down to the Panama Canal and then thousands more up the east coast of the U.S. to Nova Scotia, etc.. The ludicrous irony of this situation is that it entails the release if far more carbon into the atmosphere than is necessary while dramatically increasing the possibility of environmental accidents such as that involving the Exxon Valdez. At the same time, of course, it makes getting our Western oil products to Europe a demonstrably impractical affair. So Europe remains at the mercy of Putin!

Under Biden, U.S. oil production has fallen by 1.75 million barrels a day. His Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said frankly on Mar. 9: “We need gas and oil production to rise to meet current demand.” Republicans absolutely agree. But the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and others urged sleepy Joe to ignore their pleas, convinced that environmental catastrophes are just around the corner. It is a Fact that at this time we are utterly incapable of satisfying our energy needs with “renewable” sources. It is a Fact that dozens of predictions of impending doom going back decades have proven to be ludicrously exaggerated. It is a Fact that people in many economically challenged countries could not survive without fossil fuels. And it is a Fact that Western nations willing to compromise their energy independence for environmental reasons have naively placed their well being in the hands of criminal governments such as those which now rule the poor people of both China and Russia.

One last thing. I was shocked in 2019 to see a film, Planet of the Humans, released by the radically “progressive” Michael Moore, which nevertheless called out the fundamental hypocrisy of green radicalism, pointing out that the production of wind turbines, solar panels, etc., when all aspects of their usage were taken into account, produced a carbon footprint barely distinguishable from that of most fossil fuels. The film was of course almost universally mauled in the mainstream media, as has been Elon Musk, a champion of green energy, who recently pointed out the absolute necessity of increasing our oil and gas production immediately. Such is the level of rational consideration granted any criticism of the environmental agenda, even when that agenda compromises not only one’s personal well-being but perhaps the future of one’s entire nation.