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NOTE: Bold text in quoted material, reflects emphasis by this writer, David Burton, and not
emphasis on the part of the authors of the quoted material.
As President Joseph Biden attacks and threatens to destroy the non-renewable energy sector of the
American economy in obedient response to the cries of “save the planet” from the “green energy” extremists of the world, the
other side of the coin has come into view. Too many of us seem to have forgotten some basic facts: For every action there
is a reaction; There are always unintended consequences for every action taken; “Government is the problem”; when
attacking a problem, all aspects must be investigated – not just one manifestation of the problem.
One of President Biden’s first acts in the White House was to kill a multibillion-dollar
oil and gas pipeline that would have created some 15,000 jobs. “The Keystone pipeline that he canceled was vital to our
energy infrastructure and wasn’t going to cost taxpayers a penny.
“The Biden {action constituted} a declaration of war against one of the largest sources of new jobs
in the United States: our domestic energy producers.
“Some 80% of our energy today comes from fossil fuels, and well more than half of it comes from
oil and natural gas.
“Does Joe Biden - or anyone on his energy team - know that in the last week of 2020, during
former President Donald Trump’s final weeks in office, the United States imported zero barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia for
the first time in 35 years?
“America became the world’s largest energy exporter under Trump, and it wasn’t because of big
conglomerates such as Exxon Mobil Corp. or BP, who do a lot of their drilling outside of the U.S. It was ‘wildcatters,’ with
their hydraulic fracturing operations entirely situated within the United States, that nearly doubled domestic drilling. Such
smaller enterprises don’t have complex ‘global footprints.’
- - -
“{Importing zero barrels of oil saves} the country more than $200 billion a year - money that used
to flow to the Saudis, Iran and OPEC nations, many of whom hate us. Trump wanted our oil and gas to come from Texas, Oklahoma,
Ohio and Pennsylvania . . .
“When America eliminated its dependency on foreign producers, it also lowered energy prices for the
poorest Americans, with gas prices in many states falling to below $2 a gallon. {After just two months of President Biden},
the gas prices are hitting $4 a gallon in many states.
“The quest for energy dominance also yielded massive job gains. The number of Americans
directly employed by oil and gas producers hit 800,000 last year. The domestic oil and gas industry accounted for a larger
share of all new jobs created in the first five years coming out of the 2008 financial crisis than any other
industry.
“Biden and his media and technocratic allies view domestic energy production as a villain to vanquish.
They are prepared to sacrifice the industry and its workers on the altar of climate and ‘sustainability.’ The left sees job
losses in this industry as a small price to achieve its - unreachable - goal of zero carbon emissions by 2035.
“Let’s have a grown-up discussion on energy policy. The U.S. is going to continue to use oil
and gas for decades to come. If we don’t produce the oil and gas here, we are going to fill our tanks with oil and gas from
the Middle East or Russia.
“Biden must put jobs first and stop treating our domestic oil and gas producers as the enemies of
progress. Oil and natural gas power our computers, our cars and trucks, our factories, our furnaces, our cellphones - and
all that our $22 trillion industrial economy encompasses. To ‘build back better,’ let those producers be part of an ‘all of-
the-above’ clean, cheap and reliable all-America energy policy.” (Ref. 1)
As the Biden administration rushes to spend, spend and spend, America’s
national debt continues to spiral out of control. The questions of who will have to pay
off this burgeoning financial obligation and when will the bill come due continue to plague anyone with a smattering of
common sense.[2] By endangering the money-making and tax revenue producing
American coal, oil and gas producing industries, Biden also endangers the American economy and eliminates a source of
revenue with which to pay down our federal debt. He also threatens the jobs of some 800,000 employees of the domestic oil
and gas industry – workers who make good salaries and pay a significant amount of taxes into the federal coffers - another
source of revenue to pay off our national debt. This loss of jobs and tax revenue comes at a time when America is just
beginning to recover from the economic disaster of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The loss of jobs and revenue are not all the evils that are on the flip side of the rush toward the
“green energy” utopia and visions of a spotlessly clean environment being foisted upon the American people by the environmental
Gestapo and their dupe, President Biden.
As severe winter cold and storms hit Texas in the winter of 2021, reports of deaths resulting
therefrom caused anger in the Lone Star State. A major contributor was the loss of power throughout the state. “Anger over
Texas' power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted . . . as millions of residents in the energy capital
of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat - out for 36 hours or longer in many homes -
would return soon or stay on once it finally does.
“In all, between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas . . . had no power nearly two full days after
historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to
such extreme lows, buckling the state's power grid and causing widespread blackouts. . .”
(Ref. 3)
“Contrary to the claims of green energy profiteers and apologists in the mainstream media,
the failure of wind and solar power was largely to blame for the widespread power outages in Texas during the polar freeze
that hit the state . . .
“Before the politics of climate alarmism and cancel culture reared their ugly heads, any engineer
would have openly said wind and solar power are unsuited for a large power grid because they are dependent on weather
conditions.
“A large-scale power grid consists of two segments, baseload power and peaking power. Baseload power
is the minimum amount of energy needed for normal daily operations, which requires a fairly constant flow of power. Coal,
nuclear and, to a lesser extent, natural gas, have satisfied Texas’ baseload demand for the past century because they operate
full time.
“Peaking power is the additional power needed when the system is faced with unusual amounts of demand,
usually in July and August in Texas, when air conditioner use soars. Natural gas has commonly served to provide peaking power
because it can be cycled on and off quickly, as needed.
“{Neither} wind nor solar can be relied upon for either baseload or peaking power. Wind turbines only
generate power when the wind blows between certain speeds, and the power they generate fluctuates constantly. Solar provides no
power at night or when solar panels are covered by snow or ice and only reduced power on cloudy days and during storms.
“Wind and solar power now account for approximately 28% of Texas’ electric power supply. This increase
was not driven by market demand, but by politics. Legislators required a minimum amount of power sold on the Texas power market
to come from wind or solar power, regardless of the reliability problems it introduces into the power system. On top of that,
federal, state and local subsidies encouraged wind and solar to continue growing beyond the minimum amount set by the
state.
“The subsidies, tax credits and tax abatements allowed wind and solar producers to sell power into
the Texas market below what it costs to produce and deliver. As a result, multiple baseload coal-fueled power plants,
accounting for thousands of megawatts of electric power capacity, closed.
“Data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shows that five days before the first snowflake
fell, wind and solar provided 58% of the electric power in Texas. But clouds formed, temperatures dropped and winds temporarily
stalled, resulting in more than half the wind and solar power going offline in three days never to return during the storm,
when the problems got worse and turbines froze and snow and ice covered solar panels.
- - -
"Weather, like wind and solar power, is fickle. Because of that, no state should ever rely on
wind and solar power as a substantial part of their electric power supply. As Texas showed this past {winter} and California
demonstrates every summer, to do so is to court catastrophic, life-ending, failure.”
(Ref. 4)
The energy problems in Texas came shortly after President Biden caved in to the demands of the
Environmental Gestapo and rushed to rescind the license for the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta Canada without
adequately considering the collateral damage that will be caused by his rash action. “The new president marked his becoming
the 46th president of the United States by succumbing to the demands of the environmental extremists who are working to
return the earth to its original ‘pristine’ state when God finished six days of creating the world. According to these
self-appointed messengers of God, mankind takes a very distant second place in their considerations and if we
all freeze to death or starve to death, then so be it. Nature, as they perceive nature, is their only
consideration.” (Ref. 5)
It seems clear that President Biden has bought into the fable of life ending on earth because of
human-induced climate change. His actions, since assuming the presidency, indicate that he is continuing his previous green
energy policies and succumbing to the dictates of the Environmental Gestapo. In doing so, Biden has not let facts get in his
way.
To buttress his rationale for extreme actions to “save the planet”, President Biden “compared his
political opponents to Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, accusing them of telling the ‘big lie.’
“But when it comes to global warming, Biden is telling the big lie.
“Biden calls climate change ‘an existential threat.’ He presumably means an existential threat to
human beings. Yet the data show the opposite – that the warming of the planet saves lives.
“A study by 22 scientists from around the world published in 2015 by the British medical journal The
Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. The scientists examined over 74 million deaths in Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States
in 1985-2012. They found that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent.
“The study found that small temperature changes are particularly significant: ‘moderately hot and
cold temperatures’ caused 88.85 percent of the temperature-related deaths, while ‘extreme’ temperatures caused only 11.15
percent.
“In the same vein, in 2017 some of the world’s most eminent scientists – such as Richard Lindzen of
MIT, William Happer, the late Freeman Dyson of Princeton, the late Fred Singer of the University of Virginia, and Judith Curry
of Georgia Tech – wrote that ‘[o]bservations [over the last] 25 years … show that warming from increased atmospheric
CO2 will be benign.’
“Carbon dioxide, they note, ‘is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on
Earth.’ . . .
“Biden also has baldly asserted that because of global warming, natural disasters ‘will continue to
become more common, more devastating and more deadly.’ The data again point the opposite direction – as the earth’s
temperature has risen, natural disasters have become far less deadly.
“Since 1920, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1.29 degrees. During the same period, world
population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion. Yet the data compiled by EM-DAT (The
International Disaster Database) show that since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over
80 percent, from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.
“Consistent with this data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated last year
that ‘it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human
activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity’ and that ‘changes in tropical cyclone activity …
are not yet detectable.’
“And what about the supposed authority on climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change? The Wall Street Journal has reported that the IPPC ‘says that it too lacks evidence to show that warming is
making storms and flooding worse.’
“The facts, however, do not matter to Biden. He has been making unfounded statements about global
warming for decades. On the campaign trail in 2019, ignoring the last three decades of beneficial global warming, he bragged
that he had sought to enact climate change legislation in the 1980s. ‘I said, we have an existential threat, we are in a
situation where, if we don’t act quickly, we’re going to basically lose almost everything we have.’
“Biden also chooses to ignore the fact that even the most severe restrictions on carbon
dioxide omissions will have almost zero impact on the earth’s temperature. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels
calculated that if the United States eliminated all carbon emissions – which would not only require Americans to give up
fossil fuels, but also to stop breathing (to cease exhaling carbon dioxide) – it would only reduce global warming by a
negligible 0.052° C by 2050.
“There is, however, one carbon dioxide emission limitation measure that would benefit humanity –
convincing Biden to stop telling whoppers about global warming.” (Ref. 6)
President Joe Biden also shut down oil and gas lease sales from the nation's vast public lands and
waters in his first days in office, citing worries about climate change. Now his administration has to figure out what do with
the multibillion-dollar program without crushing a significant sector of the U.S. economy, while fending off sharp criticisms
from congressional Republicans and the oil industry.
The leasing ban is supposedly only temporary, but, as of April 2021, administration officials had
declined to say how long it would last. It was also unclear how much legal authority the government has to stop drilling on
about 23 million acres previously leased to energy companies.
By mid-March 2021, thirteen states had sued the Biden administration to end the suspension of new oil
and gas leases on federal land and water and to reschedule canceled sales of leases in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska waters and
Western states.
The reason for the Biden action is the fact that burning of oil, gas and coal from government-owned
lands and waters is a top source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 24% of the nation's greenhouse gases. Oil
and gas account for the biggest chunk of human-caused fossil fuel emissions from federal lands following a drilling surge
under former President Donald Trump.
BUT emission reductions from a permanent leasing ban would be relatively small –
about 100 million tons annually, or less than 1% of global fossil fuel emissions, according to a study by a
nonprofit research group.
Still, environmental activists and others who want more aggressive action against climate change say
a ban would nudge the economy in a new direction. Biden wants to substitute policies that promote renewable energy on public
lands, such as wind and solar power, for fossil fuel production and consumption.
It should be noted that revenues from lease sales and royalties that companies pay on
extracted oil and gas brought in more than $83 billion to the U.S. treasury over the past decade. Half of the
money from onshore drilling goes to the state where it occurred. Money from offshore drilling gets shared with states at a
lesser rate and pays for a conservation fund used to preserve land nationwide.
As of mid-April 2021, the Biden administration had postponed lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and
in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Utah. Biden earlier had suspended leasing in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.
After what they called a "fire sale" of public energy reserves under Donald Trump, Biden's team argued
that companies still had plenty of undeveloped leases - almost 14 million acres in Western states and more than 9 million acres
offshore. Companies also had about 7,700 unused drilling permits – enough for years to come according to the Biden team.
Despite the moratorium, the Biden administration continued to issue new permits for existing leases,
including more than 200 in March 2021.
The environmentalists want that to stop, but an outright drilling ban would raise thorny legal issues.
Companies could justly claim they had the right to extract oil and gas after spending years and millions of dollars to secure
leases.
A permanent ban on new leases means drilling would fade out as existing ones expired. It would be a
heavy blow for western and Gulf Coast states that heavily depend on oil and gas revenue to pay for schools, roads and other
services.
Another option would be to increase royalty fees to reflect the "social cost" of climate change -
damage from rising seas, drought, wildfires and other supposed global warming impacts. That would keep revenue flowing and
make it more expensive to drill on federal land, forcing companies to concentrate on the most profitable reserves and to
reduce emissions, although less than an outright ban would produce.
What about the loss in jobs that a leasing ban will produce? An industry-promoted University of
Wyoming study projected almost 300,000 jobs lost by 2025. But historical data on energy jobs suggest a much smaller impact
of about 60,000 jobs. That's still a significant number as the U.S. economy recovers from job losses in the Covid-19 pandemic.
And even limited job losses could profoundly affect local economies in Wyoming, New Mexico and other oil-dependent
states.
There's also no guarantee such impacts would be offset by Biden's promise to deliver millions of new
green energy jobs, such as installing solar panels or helping with environmental cleanups of abandoned oil wells and coal
mines. Despite promises by renewable energy advocates, such jobs "don't fill the bucket like oil and gas does."
The CEO pf the American Petroleum Institute said that independent forecasts show that natural
gas and oil will provide about half of the global energy mix for decades to come.[7]
In spite of the wishes of the Environmental Gestapo, the American Petroleum Institute forecast
represents the real life facts that we all face. Non-renewable energy is essential to modern life on this planet for the
foreseeable future. We can minimize harmful aspects of these energy sources, but their total and immediate elimination is
a totally unrealistic pipe dream. Any action to immediately and totally achieve the goals of the environmental extremists
will cause immense and painful harm to our modern civilization. The president of these United States must understand this
before his ill-considered actions cause irreparable harm to us all.
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References:
- Biden’s green plan declares war on American energy, Stephen Moore, Boston Herald,
Page 13, 17 April 2021.
- When the Bill Comes Due . . ., David Burton, Son of Eliyahu: Article 468, 8 April 2021.
- Texas Official: Power Outages 'a Manmade Disaster', H. Sterling Burnett, www.republicworld.com,
17 February 2021.
- Green energy main cause of Texas’ Power woes, H. Sterling Burnett, Boston Herald,
Page 12, 25 February 2021.
- Biden Surrenders to Environmentalist Stupidity, David Burton, Son of Eliyahu: Article 459,
4 February 2021.
- Joe Biden's Global Warming Emotion Is Not Supported By Facts, David Simon, Real Clear Markets,
30 March 2021.
- The Biden administration, citing climate change, halted oil and gas lease sales in January. Now, what?,
Matthew Brown and Matthew Daly, USA TODAY, 24 March 2021.
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