The Focus on ‘Green’ Energy Has Left the West Increasingly Dependent on Russian Energy

T he U.S. is now less energy-independent than it was a year ago and thus less able to send liquified natural gas (LNG) and crude-oil exports to our European allies to make up for crippling losses in Russian exports.

Jen Psaki, President Biden’s press secretary, told ABC News on Sunday that criticizing the reduction in America’s domestic energy production is a “misdiagnosis” of the problem. She asserted that “we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general . . . and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others.”

It’s clear that the Biden administration is infested with devotees of green energy who are hostile to the fossil fuels we urgently need right now. So too is the European Union, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, has just called for the continent to “massively invest in renewables,” a dubious short-term course given the limitations of wind and solar technology.

Just this month, Biden appointees at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission erected regulatory barriers that essentially make it impossible for the United States to ever build another LNG export terminal. Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia called the move “reckless.”

Will President Biden and our European allies now reverse course? It’s unlikely, given how deeply radical green ideas have infected the West. And part of the reason for that is that Russia has spent decades on “disinformation” campaigns undermining Western fossil-fuel production. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, has been a leading supporter of using woke capitalism as a tool to undermine the West.

The media have focused on Russia’s attempts to subvert our elections. But H. R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s national-security adviser from 2017 to 2018, told the BBC in December 2017 that Russia has “a sophisticated campaign of subversion” to “polarize communities and pit them against each other” and that “one of the most important things is to pull the curtain back on this activity, and to expose it.”

Some of that activity has had the aim of making the West increasingly dependent on Russian energy. In 2021, the United States imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than from any other country. Russia accounted for 21 percent of all U.S. gasoline imports.

The Russians are also publicly celebrating the fact that Germany, after shutting down its nuclear reactors, became dependent on Russia for 50 percent of its natural gas and 41 percent of its oil. Dimitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, scoffed at Germany’s decision to finally delay certification of the unopened Nordstream 2 natural-gas pipeline.

“Welcome to the brave new world where Europeans are very soon going to pay 2.000 euros [$2,140] for 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas!” Medvedev chortled on his Twitter account.

“We have never seen such a huge gap between the foreign-policy needs of the West in energy and the complete refusal of U.S. policy-makers to resist the special-interest demands of environmental groups opposing energy development,” James Lucier, an energy analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington, told me.

McMaster told CNBC last week that Russia has for years been behind a concerted “disinformation” campaign to disparage the use of natural gas and fossil fuels and encourage the West to focus on green energy. He is backed up by a 2018 report from the House Committee on Science. It found that Russia had exploited social-media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in an effort to influence the United States’ domestic energy policies. “Russian agents attempted to manipulate Americans’ opinions about pipelines, fossil fuels, fracking, and climate change,” the panel’s GOP chairman, Lamar Smith from Texas, concluded. “The American people deserve to know if what they see on social media is the creation of a foreign power seeking to undermine our domestic energy policy.”

Europeans have also raised the warning flag. Back in 2014, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of NATO and former premier of Denmark, accused Vladimir Putin’s government of trying to discredit fracking.

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

Russian politician and exiled dissident Konstantin Borovoy has written an entire book — Russia against USA: Russia’s Disinformation Campaign against USA and Its Citizens — that warns about the extent of Russia’s disinformation activities worldwide.

Western leaders shouldn’t try to negotiate with Putin, whom Borovoy called a “criminal power.” Borovoy pointed to the agreement that Russia and Western powers reached after the 2008 war in Georgia. The deal was that Russian forces would leave Georgia, but it never happened.

“It looks like before World War II, when everyone was trying to reach some kind of agreement with Hitler, and it wasn’t very effective, as we know,” Borovoy said. “It’s very dangerous to feed wild animals.”

Sadly, that is precisely what the West has done with Vladimir Putin over the past dozen years. While Putin plotted to undermine and eventually invade Ukraine, the West made his job all the easier by pursuing energy policies that transferred billions of dollars to Moscow’s coffers while pursuing misguided “Green New Deal” policies.

Those policies have now left our European allies dependent on Russian energy, and they’ve left the U.S. much less able to supply any energy gaps with our own domestic production.