President Joe Biden continues his fight against domestic fossil fuel production while bolstering foreign energy efforts that will harm the environment far more than American activity does.
Worse, now he is doing so in ways that may prove illegal, and that could leave taxpayers on the hook for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. His actions are manifestly harmful to U.S. interests.
On June 1, Biden’s Interior Department said it is suspending all oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite a 2017 law directing the federal government to open the territory to drilling. The putative reason for suspending the property rights of the leaseholders, who paid the U.S. government good money for the drilling rights, is to conduct additional environmental and legal/antitrust reviews. The excuse is nonsense: U.S. law directs the government to allow the drilling, and the environmental regulations governing it are already stringent.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that ANWR contains 10.4 billion barrels of crude oil. This oil can provide energy for Alaskans and all the Western states, keeping prices low and avoiding shortages. It is oil that can keep the Trans-Alaska Pipeline operational, which now runs at 75% less than peak production, resulting in slower delivery times and a worse quality of oil due to chemical processes caused by low flow in freezing weather.
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources cite studies saying the leases could generate up to $296 billion in new federal revenue and create somewhere between 55,000 and 130,000 jobs. The native Iñupiat community of Kaktovik, Alaska, whose environment would be affected by the drilling, has strongly and repeatedly supported energy development there and has denounced the Biden administration’s decision.
The lessees have contractual rights that Biden’s order temporarily abrogates. If the suspension of the leases continues, legal fights are sure to ensue — but in the end, the federal government will likely be liable not just for repaying the amount of the lease bids but also for the lost production/profits of the lessees. Instead of gaining hundreds of billions of dollars for the federal Treasury, the feds — meaning taxpayers — could be on the hook for hundreds of billions required in any settlement.
Biden’s suspension of the leases does not occur in a vacuum. He also has “paused” all new energy-development leasing in federal lands and waters and blocked the Keystone Pipeline, the latter move stopping the creation of more than 10,000 temporary construction jobs and at least hundreds of permanent ones. And at the same time he is contravening congressional intent (and arguably the letter of the law) by stopping the ANWR projects, he is also waiving congressionally approved sanctions against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline while failing to punish Russian interests for the hack that suspended service in the Colonial Pipeline that serves much of the U.S. East Coast.
Even if Biden is trying to help the environment, he is doing the opposite. As described by Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the industry-backed Institute for Energy Research, Biden’s kibosh on domestic production, combined with his failure to oppose foreign operations, means that he is disfavoring drilling and transportation conducted under the “finest environmental controls in the world.” Other nations without adequate controls go about their merry ways, with Russian projects also producing 400,000 jobs filling energy needs that could be filled by Americans and Canadian production instead.
Kish said, not without reason, that this new move to suspend the ANWR leases amounts to being “part of a multi-dimensional war on conventional American energy and energy independence.”
The Left’s disdain for American fossil fuels is more akin to a cultish faith than it is the result of reason. Creating energy shortages here at home will do nothing to help the environment, but it will harm the U.S. economy and its security. In offering these anti-energy sops to the Left, Biden is putting America last.
