The world is a more dangerous place today than it was four years ago, largely due to bad energy policy. Restrictions on fossil fuel and nuclear power development in North America and Europe, for example, resulted in rising prices for oil and natural gas, and President Vladimir Putin used Russia‘s windfall oil and gas profits to wage war in Ukraine.
With rising uncertainty abroad, the world can no longer afford to have an America asleep at the wheel on energy policy. Rather than hamstring American energy producers with mounting regulations, our nation needs to show global energy leadership by producing as much energy as possible to drive down prices and make the United States an arsenal of energy dominance.
Luckily, we have plenty of natural resources, but we need the political will to develop them.
Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, a technology that liberal politicians wanted to ban, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of natural gas and oil. This surge in production has brought down prices, saving millions of people hundreds of dollars on their heating bills every winter and reducing prices at the pump.
Our surplus of energy has also helped bail out a European continent that has committed energy suicide by banning fracking, shutting down their coal and nuclear plants, and becoming overly dependent upon Russian natural gas and unreliable wind and solar generators.
Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show American liquefied natural gas, or LNG, exports increased by 141% in 2022, compared to 2021, and Europe accounted for 64% of U.S. LNG exports. This begs the question, where would the Old Continent be without us?
Despite the obvious economic and geopolitical benefits of domestic energy production, the Biden administration is trying its hardest to shrink it by delaying new LNG export terminals, relitigating oil and natural gas pipeline permits, and blocking energy development on millions of acres of federal land. At a time when the world needs a strong America, the Biden administration is oozing weakness.
The same is true for mining essential metals and minerals. While the Biden administration has lavished hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies on wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles, it has also canceled several essential mining projects in Alaska, Minnesota, and Nevada, to name a few, that would provide the needed copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earth materials to build these substandard energy resources in the first place.
Who benefits from these incoherent energy decisions? Unfortunately, the answer is Communist China.
International Energy Agency research shows that China is the dominant producer of rare earth metals and the largest refiner of copper, cobalt nickel, lithium, and rare earth metals in the world. Furthermore, 80% of the solar panel manufacturing capacity is also located in China, meaning President Xi Jinping ultimately has control over all of the energy sources promoted by the Biden administration.
America can and must do better, and the only way to do that is to become the dominant energy powerhouse of the world. We must immediately bolster our domestic production and export capacity of coal, natural gas, and oil. We must relicense or restart existing nuclear power facilities and embrace a buildout of new nuclear power plants to reduce the need for imported fuels in the future. Lastly, the U.S. must also enact permitting reform that allows us to open new mines in a reasonable time frame while maintaining important safeguards for the environment.
This agenda of American energy leadership will create thousands of good-paying, family-supporting jobs while also depriving our enemies of the one thing they need most: a source of revenue. Peace through energy dominance is possible; we just need policymakers who are smart enough to seize the moment.
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Isaac Orr (@thefrackingguy) is a policy fellow specializing in energy and environmental policy at Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank.
