It canceled one egregious plan, but the Left’s record against energy still speaks for itself.
It canceled one egregious plan, but the Left’s record against energy still speaks for itself.
I magine this: You get called into your boss’s office. You’re told, “The company is studying the potential impacts of firing you,” but then the boss immediately backtracks, saying, “There’s some confusion here; that’s something we’re not going to do.” Would you simply return to your workstation, content that your employer expects to keep you around for the long term?
President Joe Biden just delivered a similarly confusing message to every Michigan resident. On November 8, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre admitted that the federal government was “studying the impact of shutting down the Line 5” pipeline, which moves essential heating and transportation fuels throughout Michigan and the Midwest. The next day Jean-Pierre walked back that statement, explaining that there had been confusion over the reporting and that shutting down the pipeline is “something we’re not going to do.” Given the history of Democratic Party leaders when it comes to energy issues, it looks like Jean-Pierre admitted the quiet part out loud and then had to retract it.
For over a decade, senior Democrats have plainly and repeatedly stated their intentions to use any and all regulatory means to bankrupt America’s domestic energy sector and raise energy prices. When will we start taking them at their word?
In 2008, candidate Barack Obama promised, “If somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
During the same campaign, Obama promised, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”
Along the same lines, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promised at a 2016 CNN town-hall event to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
When it was Joe Biden’s turn to run for the nation’s highest office, he promised, on numerous occasions, to limit or stop fracking and to hinder the American oil-and-gas industry. In one debate appearance, Biden stated that, should he be elected, there would be “no more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends!”
In another primary debate, the moderator asked Biden if, as president, he would “be willing to sacrifice [economic] growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of blue-collar workers in the interest of transitioning to [a] greener economy?” The former vice president’s very clear response? “The answer is yes.”
For her part, presidential candidate Kamala Harris bluntly stated in a 2019 climate town hall: “There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
Today, energy prices are skyrocketing, the coal industry is teetering on the brink, and tens of thousands of miners have been put out of work. From its first days, the Biden-Harris administration has worked overtime to stall domestic oil and gas production, while propping up Russian pipelines and committing our energy future to Chinese solar producers. It has killed the Keystone XL pipeline, paused oil and gas leasing on federal lands, and reentered the country in the economically damaging and environmentally questionable Paris agreement. Now it has offered, and quickly retracted, an admission that the administration was studying the impact of shutting down Line 5.
Of course, officials bluster that they’re rapidly moving workers over to “good-paying union jobs” in the green economy. But even the New York Times refuses to buy that lie. The Gray Lady has reported, “The green economy is shaping up to look less like the industrial workplace that lifted workers into the middle class in the 20th century than something more akin to an Amazon warehouse or a fleet of Uber drivers: grueling work schedules, few unions, middling wages and limited benefits.”
It’s not possible to mistake the intentions of the administration any longer. It will continue to focus on an economy-impairing climate campaign instead of life-sustaining domestic energy resources. Line 5 is only the latest example of the administration’s promise to use the weight of government to shutter American energy producers, even if its illusory “green economy” forces American citizens to choose between heating and eating.
For those who still refuse to recognize the obvious, perhaps the words of Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee to become comptroller of the currency, will provide some final clarity. In a March 2021 presentation to the Jain Family Institute’s Social Wealth Seminar, Omarova offered these thoughts on American energy:
“A lot of the smaller players in [the coal and oil and gas] industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order. At least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?”