Larry Summers is an economist who held positions in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Certainly no “conservative,” he nevertheless seems committed to a rational as opposed to slavishly ideological perspective. Interviewed on Wall Street Week on Oct. 7, he willingly admitted that Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline as well as his hostility towards fossil fuels in general and natural gas in particular, were horrible mistakes. He was responding to OPEC’s decision just a few days earlier to reduce oil production by 2 million barrels a day, a move seen by Biden and others in the West as a brazen attempt to jack up the price of gasoline throughout the world.
Only weeks after the OPEC decision, gas prices began to fall. They have been doing so ever since, basically, it would seem, due to a lack of demand. But while the Saudis et al. have used that fact in defending themselves of the charge that they had attempted to hold the world for ransom, many such as Summers are convinced the West needs to free itself as much as possible of dependence on such foreign powers. Biden himself had clearly thought so in expressing his anger with the OPEC decision.
But in addition to this obvious political consideration, it is an unequivocal fact that until we develop the technology to live without them, we remain dependent on fossil fuels of various kinds. For decades now predictions of immanent environmental catastrophes have proven to be just so much hysterical gibberish. Destructive weather patterns that have been happening forever are now immediately blamed upon the greenhouse gases produced by industrialized Man. But as I have pointed out in these blogs and elsewhere, the “anthropogenic” narrative is a theory fraught with a host of unanswered questions. Those willing to rationally investigate the scientific data and geological record must admit as much. But as Tulsi Gabbard pointed out in leaving the Democratic Party, the Left today has generally abandoned rational dialogue for childish name-calling and hysterical rhetoric. Check out the career arc of academic and climatologist Judith Curry who has dared highlight the multitude of unknowns plaguing a narrative presented as unequivocal fact! The reaction she invoked among her fellow academics is not unlike that of my various “progressive” acquaintances who have never read a single paper challenging climate orthodoxy, yet smugly dismiss any skepticism regarding that sacred doctrine as, guess what, just so much “disinformation.” Ugh!
I used Larry Summers to introduce the subject of Biden’s climate policies because his affiliation with two Democratic Presidents pretty much disqualifies the Left from dismissing him as just another right wing jerk in the pocket of the relentlessly greedy energy sector. In his interview, Summers emphasized the need for a “balanced” strategy rather than one based on “total hostility to fossil fuels.” I interpret the word “balanced” in this context to mean “rational” or “pragmatic.” But Rationalism and Pragmatism are hardly important to those who celebrate their commitment to “feelings,” a commitment that seems inevitably to lead to the absurd conclusion that questioning the Global Warming Narrative entails a crass indifference to the future of the planet.
Obviously I am not promoting such indifference. We must grant the possibility that our use of fossil fuels may be endangering the environment. But at the same time the sort of knee-jerk reaction against all fossil fuels that characterizes the contemporary Left is clearly a product of its anti-Western, anti-Industrial, anti-Capitalist bias. It is a bias that is little more than a form of religious dementia and it is seriously compromising our ability to deal effectively with the environmental issues before us, however real or imagined they may be.
Tell me, were not Biden’s anti-energy thrusts in his first days in office simply pathetic attempts to show the politically correct that he truly hated fossil fuels, whatever the cost to those who had elected him?