Glick Must Go

W ith gas prices running at nearly $4.50 a gallon — almost $2 a gallon higher than when President Trump left office — soaring electric-utility costs for homeowners and businesses, and the threat of blackouts and brownouts in as many as a dozen states, the last thing America needs is a green zealot running the federal agency overseeing American energy policy. But in tapping Richard Glick for a second term to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), President Biden has doubled down on his crusade to eliminate oil, gas, and coal from America’s energy supply.

Glick’s first 18 months at the head of FERC have been catastrophically bad. He has presided over the biggest increase in energy costs in 40 years; his regulatory assault has led to scuttling pipelines and other urgently needed energy-security infrastructure; and his green-policy directives against coal and natural gas and in favor of expensive and unreliable renewable energy have put the nation at risk of energy shortages and power-grid vulnerability.

Renominating Glick (originally a Trump appointee) is tantamount to rehiring an NFL coach to a four-year contract extension after the football team went 2–15.

Congress should take a hard look at Glick’s record and his extreme bias against fossil fuels — which still account for 70 percent of America’s energy supply. He has insisted on numerous occasions that eliminating fossil-fuel use is imperative because climate change is an “existential threat.” So instead of doing the primary job of FERC, which is to ensure an affordable and reliable supply of electric power throughout the country and safeguard the electric grid, he has shown a strong bias against natural-gas production and infrastructure.

One of Glick’s most unforgivable initiatives has been attempting to implement a new policy at FERC that would require any new natural-gas pipeline anywhere in the country to calculate all greenhouse gas emitted before obtaining a permit. Those in the energy industry argue that this rule would effectively ban new pipelines, as the requirement would nearly double compliance costs. Considerable blowback from industry has delayed the FERC rule, but under a new four-year term, Glick would be able to make this anti-pipeline policy the law of the land.

Glick’s attack on natural-gas pipelines makes no sense from an energy-security standpoint, and it isn’t even smart environmental policy. Pipelines are by far the most effective and cleanest way to transport natural gas from wellheads to power plants. And natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel than oil or coal. It’s clear that the radical greens realize that with cheap natural gas available, their dream of costly wind and solar power goes up in smoke.

It’s not just Republicans who oppose Glick’s green agenda. West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who heads up the Senate committee with oversight of FERC, has blasted Glick’s FERC campaign against natural gas as “beyond the pale.” He said that pipelines are necessary to “help keep costs down for American families and create good paying jobs.”

Glick has also opposed coal and nuclear projects as well. Today, more than 60 percent of our electric power come from the three sources of energy — coal, gas, and nuclear plants — that he is trying to block. He’s bought into the unsubstantiated woke complaint that natural-gas pipelines and other energy infrastructure adversely affect low-income and minority communities. In truth, these energy projects bring needed jobs and development to low-income towns.

Politico has heralded Glick as “Joe Biden’s Most Effective Climate Warrior.” Truer words were seldom written.

Of course, Glick is hardly alone as a Biden anti-fossil-fuel green zealot. Biden’s first choice to be comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, said: “A lot of the smaller players in that industry [oil, gas, and coal] are probably going to go bankrupt in short order. At least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.” At least she had to withdraw her nomination.

Then there is Biden’s interior secretary, Deb Haaland, who, when she served in the House, co-sponsored the Green New Deal in 2019 and pledged to vote against all new fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was nominated to the Federal Reserve, has said that federal financial regulations need to be “reimagined” to save the world from an “unlivably hot planet.”  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wants to eliminate cars that use gasoline over the next 15 years.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he is doing “everything he can” to reduce gas prices, and he even says he wants more oil and gas production here in America. But many of his policies, not to speak of his choice of appointees, send a very different message.

If he really wants to prove his claim, Biden should withdraw Glick’s nomination.

One of America’s greatest economic and national-security vulnerabilities today is the threat to the reliability of our electric grid. It isn’t climate change that threatens blackouts and routine third-world-type electric-power disruptions, as FERC is now warning. The much bigger danger to the grid is climate-change “warriors” who are willing to radically disrupt our daily energy supply in order to save the planet.

Politico notes, “Richard Glick may see his efforts to put climate change at the forefront of federal energy policy cost him his job.” If we want lower energy prices and American energy independence, we should all hope and pray that Politico is right.