In a sign of the tough road ahead for the Biden administration’s ambitious energy policy, a group representing fossil fuel producers sued the administration Wednesday. The Western Energy Alliance alleges that the pause on oil and gas leases on federal land and waters exceeds presidential authority. The suit comes as the administration rolled out a series of executive orders to address climate change.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said, “The stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now. It is existential.”
As part of President Biden’s ultimate goal of eliminating fossil fuel as a power source by 2035, and from the entire U.S. economy entirely by 2050, Wednesday’s executive orders direct agencies to end federal subsidies for fossil fuels, to pause new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. It aims to conserve 30% of the country’s lands and ocean waters in the next 10 years and requires federal agencies to move to all-electric vehicle fleets.
It carries significant risks and opposition.
Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, said: “Climate change is not the most important environmental problem. Most of the trends are going in the right direction: Deaths from natural disasters are at an all-time low. Carbon emissions in the United States peaked over a decade ago; they’ve been going down ever since. They’ve been going down in wealthy countries for almost 40 years. We should continue to do what’s been working, replacing coal with natural gas and nuclear, but this is not the apocalyptic trend that people have been led to believe it is.”
Shellenberger, an environmentalist, a Democrat, and Biden voter, maintains that wind and solar produce their own environmental damage, adding, “They just gave permission, the federal government, to industrial wind farms to kill condors. This is, for people that are environmentalists, true conservationists — that’s bonkers.”
The huge blades of wind farms kill eagles, hawks, and birds of prey by the thousands. Wind and solar eat up vast swaths of land and pose issues of disposal — problems that often raise deep opposition at the local level.
Then, there is the issue of jobs at a time of devastating job loss from COVID-19.
Republicans will no doubt attack what they see as Democratic hypocrisy on the issue. Climate czar Kerry is known to fly on the Heinz Family Foundation’s private Gulfstream jet. Private jets consume roughly 40 times the carbon per passenger as commercial jets.
