Biden’s Dizzying Energy Policy Is Even Making Climate Warriors Scratch Their Heads
You’d think after achieving $5 a gallon nationwide gas prices and gutting domestic oil and gas producers, America’s environmental extremists would be elated and emboldened. But President Joe Biden’s energy policy is so incoherent, even Green New Deal socialists are frustrated, according to reporting by Politico’s Zack Colman.
“The climate advocates who cheered President Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House last year are preparing to give up on Washington,” Colman writes. “Instead, environmentalists and many of their Democratic allies are starting to shift their focus to state capitals as the places to press for action on climate change — going back to a strategy that they employed with some success during the Trump era.”
Green activists are apparently shocked and angry at their failure to get massive subsidies and payouts from the doomed Build Back Better bill. The firewall against that plan was coal state Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia
Why should these activists be surprised that a moderate Dem would balk at decimating his own constituents? That’s entitled arrogance in the extreme.
The Biden administration’s destructive energy goals aren’t even subtle. Mark Mazur, who left the Treasury Department in September, said the quiet part out loud, as Bloomberg reported: “We don’t want lower prices for fossil-fuel buyers. We prefer higher prices,” he said about possible gas-tax holidays and how this “undercuts the administration’s climate change goals.”
Team Biden is pursuing means to harm U.S. oil and gas producers while simultaneously begging foreign despots in countries like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for more carbon-based oil and gas. Biden’s doublespeak is frustrating to both sides of the energy debate domestically.
And during his recent European NATO trip, Biden trotted out his favorite scapegoat for his own failed domestic policies: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The reason why gas prices are up is because of Russia, Russia Russia,” Biden said at a press conference at the NATO Summit, where he called again for a gas tax holiday and Russian oil price caps. It’s no wonder that domestic anti-oil rabble rousers are frustrated if Biden describes himself as a hobbled actor whose fate is dictated by an overseas despot.
Biden completely ignores the more than a year of botched policymaking by his team prior to the Ukrainian invasion, from lifting sanctions against the NordStream 2 pipeline to canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and denying oil and gas drilling permits. NASDAQ reported how gas prices were already rising prior to the invasion.
The Washington Post admitted “Americans aren’t really buying into the ‘Putin price hike.’” It’s no wonder Biden’s approval ratings are plummeting.
Meanwhile on Biden’s America Last campaign, Reuters reported that rather than selling these barrels to American consumers, “more than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserves release to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month.”
Eco activists are also upset by a recent Supreme Court ruling reining in the separation of powers violations by the Environmental Protection Agency over greenhouse gas regulation. Even the Greenies know Biden’s team needs to work on its competence.
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Texas and California Agree: Depend on Wind Energy and Prepare for Blackouts
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement responding to the latest power outages in Texas:
“It might shock people to discover that the state of Texas has fallen into the same green energy dependency cycle which has captured California. At least that is what the agency overseeing utilities in Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is reporting.
“ERCOT is urging Texans and Texas businesses to conserve energy this week due to a projected capacity shortage. How could Texas, the king of oil and natural gas, be facing an electricity shortage, you might ask? A combination of record high demand, failure to add new coal, natural gas and nuclear thermal capacity and the failure of the wind to blow is the answer.
Remember this is the same Texas ERCOT which has encouraged the growth of wind and solar without increasing the capacity of coal, natural gas and nuclear over the past decade putting all of the future electricity needs of the oil state at the whim of the wind and sun gods. Just two winters ago, it was Texas which suffered from massive power outages due to wind and solar shortages and a cavalcade of other operational mistakes, and now they find themselves in the same exact vice.
“California is well-known for being whacko-stupid in their pursuit of unreliable energy displacing coal, natural gas and nuclear, but the fact that the nation’s second most populous state has allowed its own internal electricity generation system to fall into the green abyss is beyond absurd.
The difference is that Texas legislators are supposed to be smart enough to allow markets to work. Unfortunately, they decided on a state run electricity generation plan years ago which is now bearing the sour fruit of shortages, like all socialist systems do.
It is time for Texas to revisit their state electricity generation strategy before they become the laughing stock of the country. A state which has mocked California for a generation suffering because they didn’t understand that to have a reliable grid, you need reliable energy sources. As an oil and natural gas producing state, you would think the politicians in Austin might have read their own brochures.”
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EPA now stuck between a rock and a hard place on CO2
EPA is stuck. What they will now do is anybody’s guess. Enjoy their dilemma!
There are lots of happy reports on the Supreme Court’s ruling throwing out EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan. Some go so far as to suggest that EPA is barred from regulating power plant CO2 emissions.
It is not quite that simple and the result is rather amusing. EPA is still required to regulate CO2 under the terms of the Clean Air Act, but that Act provides no way to do that regulation. The Clean Power Plan attempted to expand an obscure minor clause in the Act to do the job but SCOTUS correctly ruled that the clause does not confer that kind of massive authority.
EPA is between a rock and a hard place. It should tell Congress that it cannot do the job and needs a new law, along the lines of the SO2 law added to the Act in 1990, curbing emissions. But such a law has zero chance of passing in the foreseeable future.
EPA is stuck. What they will now do is anybody’s guess. Enjoy their dilemma!
Here is a bit more detail on the situation.
On one hand EPA’s legal mandate to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act is clear. First the (prior) Supreme Court ruled that CO2 was a “pollutant” under the Act. This is because buried in the 1990 Amendments was a clause adding causing climate change to the definition of “pollutant”. The Court accepted the government’s claim that the CO2 increase could cause climate change. The new Court could change this but is unlikely to do so.
Given CO2 as a pollutant under the Act, EPA was required to decide if it was dangerous to human well being or not. It then produced an “endangerment finding” saying that CO2 was indeed a threat.
Given these two steps the Act then requires EPA to regulate CO2. It has been trying to figure out how to do so ever since.
The deep problem is that the Clean Air Act specifies very specific regulatory actions, none of which work for CO2. This is because CO2 is nothing like the true pollutants that the Act was developed to regulate.
The Act’s mainline mechanism is the NAAQS (pronounced “nacks”) which stands for National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These standards specify the ambient concentration levels allowed for various pollutants. Carbon dioxide’s cousin carbon monoxide is one of these pollutants. Locations that exceed the NAAQS receive stiff penalties.
Clearly this mechanism assumes that local levels are due to local emissions, which can be controlled to achieve and maintain compliance.
But CO2 is nothing like that. There is no way America can control the ambient CO2 level. Even if humans are causing that level (which is itself controversial), it is then based on global emissions. CO2 is not a local pollutant.
For a CO2 NAAQS EPA could either set the standard below the global level or above it. If below then all of America would be out of compliance and subject to the Act’s penalties, with no way to comply. It is very unlikely that the Court’s would allow these universal endless penalties.
If the CO2 NAAQS were above the present level then there would be no legal basis for EPA taking any action, since compliance was complete.
So the NAAQS mechanism simply does not work.
Another major mechanism is to control the emissions of what are called “hazardous air pollutants” or HAPS. EPA explains it this way:
“Hazardous air pollutants are those known to cause cancer and other serious health impacts. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate toxic air pollutants, also known as air toxics, from categories of industrial facilities.”
But CO2 is nontoxic, so not a HAP. In fact our exhaled breath contains over one hundred times the ambient level of CO2, that is over 40,000 ppm. Clearly if ambient 400 ppm CO2 were toxic we would all be dead. It would be absurd for EPA to try to classify CO2 as a HAP. No Court would stand for it.
The only other piece of Clean Air Act that EPA might try to use is called “New Source Performance Standards” but as the name says they only apply to new construction (or major modifications). The myriad existing fossil fueled power plants that supply our daily juice would not be covered. Even worse if EPA drove up the cost of new gas fired plants we would likely restart the host of retired coal fueled plants. What a hoot that would be!
So there you have it. EPA bought itself CO2 as a Clean Air Act pollutant, but there is no way under the Act to regulate it. To mix metaphors, EPA is all dressed up with no place to go. The Supreme Court decision returned EPA to its regulatory dead end.
I find this ridiculous situation to be truly laughable. What were they thinking? Does the EPA Administrator understand this? Has he told the President? How about Congress?
EPA’s problem with CO2 is much deeper than the latest Supreme Court Decision. The Clean Air Act simply does not work for CO2. What will EPA do?
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/epa-now-stuck-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-on-co2
***************************************************UN journal touts ‘The Benefits of World Hunger’ – ‘Hunger has great positive value…Hungry people are the most productive people’
Green/Left elitism out in the open
The UN Chronicle, which bills itself as "The magazine of the United Nations, Since 1946" originally published this essay in 2008 by Professor George Kent of the University of Hawaii: "Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world's economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour. ... How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?"
"More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?" ...
"For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset."
Update: After outcry, the UN pulls the essay from its website on July 6, 2022, claiming it was satire!
Climate Depot's Morano comments: "This is a UN article and was published in 2008 in the UN Chronicle. It is now just getting media attention and the author of the article, Professor George Kent, told Climate Depot on July 6, 2022, that the UN article is most definitely not a 'satire' but intended to be 'provocative.' The UN is now trying to erase history by deleting the essay and falsey pretending that it was merely a "satire."
Given how the world has been transformed under the 'new normal' of COVID lockdowns, it seems this old UN Chronicle article presciently reveals how the World Economic Forum and the UN & the WHO, seek to rule humanity with an iron bureaucratic fist and wish to keep the 'masses' poor, tired, and hungry."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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