Fifteen years ago, the United States was importing most of its oil — 12.5 million barrels per day, or nearly twice total domestic oil production at the time. Also 15 years ago, the U.S. was emitting about 20% more in greenhouse gases than it does today. Most Americans are glad that the U.S. has reduced emissions so much while simultaneously achieving energy independence — and it’s all due to fracking.
Unfortunately, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders want to turn the clock back to the days of higher emissions and greater dependency on foreign oil. That is the certain practical result of the policies that both men outlined in their recent debate.
Biden promised to stop issuing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land and offshore. He also promised to ban “new fracking.” In other words, he wants the newly energy-independent U.S. to go back to importing most of its oil from places such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Note that it was precisely this policy that turned the Middle East into a powder keg.
As Salena Zito noted, the fracking process takes just a couple of days, and so when a politician says he opposes “new fracking,” it means he wants to ban all fracking. And as one of the moderators alluded in a question to Sanders, the Sanders-Biden no-fracking policy will immediately return the U.S. to using coal instead of natural gas, doubling greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy produced.
Renewable energy simply cannot replace the contribution currently made by natural gas. Gas can handle electrical loads when the wind dies down or the sun sets, whereas renewables cannot. Sanders failed to address this inconvenient fact; he became outright evasive when asked directly about how fracking has reduced carbon emissions.
If the Biden-Sanders war on natural gas makes dirty coal the cheapest fuel for electricity once again, it will provide a hilarious and well-deserved lesson in unintended consequences. But it won’t be so funny for the hundreds of thousands of workers in the energy industry, whose economically sustainable, wealth-creating jobs cannot be replaced by any amount of Sovietic Green New Deal central planning.
Meanwhile, as beautiful as those new Teslas are, renewables will not be powering most people’s cars for decades, if only due to the difficulty and expense involved in battery design and production. This means the U.S. will continue to need oil. And so, if the effective Biden-Sanders ban on domestic oil production goes into effect, then consumers can expect to pay vastly more at the pump.
Even worse, the money they spend will once again go to enrich foreign producers and not to employ the hundreds of thousands of Americans currently working to produce that oil — many of them living and voting in politically sensitive places such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.
On the topic of energy, the last debate showed that there is no daylight between Biden and Sanders. Both share the same unrealistic, socialistic vision that involves putting millions of people out of good, useful jobs, raising taxes to pay them for useless, busy-work jobs, forfeiting American energy independence, and restoring power to OPEC for the foreseeable future.
No thanks, Joe.
