Joe Biden is giving himself whiplash on energy policy.
Biden's slavish devotion to the green lobby and its climate change hysteria is costing America billions in exports after Biden issued a ban on Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports. It will also force U.S. allies in Europe to seek energy deals with Russia.
America is the world's largest exporter of LNG thanks to our use of fracking to extract oil and gas from the ground. It's the most incredible energy story in history. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. was an importer of natural gas. We now lead the planet in exports of LNG and have allowed our European allies to avoid reliance on Russia for this critical energy supply.
LNG also burns a lot cleaner than coal, making it the preferred coal substitute for countries like China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
But LNG is evil because it gives off more carbon emissions than the wind or the sun. That's why the greens called for a pause in LNG projects until a complete life-cycle environmental assessment is completed, a process that could take years.
On the economy, even as Americans struggle with the consequences of inflation, the LNG boom is creating many of the blue-collar jobs that President Biden promised to voters with his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.”
Given this reality, what explains these self-destructive attacks on the American LNG industry? The answer may lie in a paper from Cornell professor Robert Howarth that has received an outsized share of media attention. Last October, Howarth published an analysis claiming that LNG “is worse for climate than coal.” Despite the study not yet having a peer review, the paper has been covered uncritically in news outlets such as Politico, NBC, and the New Yorker and touted by Democratic lawmakers such as Senator Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.). It is quickly becoming a rallying cry for environmentalists to use in pressuring the Biden administration.
Not surprisingly, any reporter who cared to examine the paper more closely would have discovered Prof. Howarth's extreme bias, using an "apples to oranges" comparison to "prove" that LNG is worse for the climate than coal.
Howarth is from the school of (non) thought that starts from the premise in any analysis of energy that if it comes from a fossil fuel, it's evil and bad.
This is what Joe Biden is predicating his ruinous policy on LNG. And the U.S. and our European allies are going to suffer the consequences.