It would be yet another pander to the radical environmentalists who prefer higher prices at home and dirtier energy from abroad.
It would be yet another pander to the radical environmentalists who prefer higher prices at home and dirtier energy from abroad.
T he Biden White House is considering declaring a “national climate emergency” to block American energy development while appeasing its extremist environmentalist donor base.
Top advisers to President Joe Biden resumed talks on declaring such an emergency. The goal would be to suspend offshore drilling and oil exports to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg states explicitly that the administration knows such a declaration wouldn’t actually help the environment. The real purpose of the announcement is that it “would galvanize climate-minded voters.” This wouldn’t even be the first time this month Biden sacrificed America’s energy interests in the name of his reelection prospects.
“President Biden has treated the climate crisis as an emergency since day one and will continue to build a clean energy future that lowers utility bills, creates good-paying union jobs, makes our economy the envy of the world and prioritizes communities that for too long have been left behind,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez told Bloomberg.
In Biden’s head, it’s also not the first time he’s declared a climate emergency.
In an interview last year with the Weather Channel, Biden falsely said that he’d “already done that” when asked whether he intends to declare a climate emergency. The inaccuracy was so blatant that his statement was fact-checked as false by CNN, which is not exactly known as a right-leaning news source. CNN later blamed Biden’s false statement on “the pressure he’s under” to avoid insinuating that the president could possibly be in a state of mental decline.
In 2022, before the passage of the climate-policy-heavy Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden considered “going beast mode” and declaring a global-warming emergency if he didn’t get his way. Biden’s claims to have made “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever” in his only major legislative accomplishment, the nominally $800 billion IRA, which is now projected to cost an additional $364 billion.
Biden’s White House has repeatedly caved to political pressure from environmental groups, who make up a critical donor and activist base for the president’s hotly contested reelection campaign. Yet environmental extremists regularly demand the suspension of civil rights and regular government order in favor of more aggressive anti-global-warming policies.
Previous decisions, such as Biden’s January blocking of approvals for critical new liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) export permits on alleged environmental grounds, have greatly harmed America’s national interests while doing little for the planet. But they did make Biden’s radical donor and activist base very happy.
Climate Defiance, the same environmental group the White House praised in January as environmental “leaders,” is now openly posting videos of its activists harassing Republican senator Lisa Murkowski because they believe she is “a murderer” and an “ecocidal pyromaniac” for opposing the group’s extreme environmentalist agenda.
The fact that, if these environmentalist groups got their way, we’d be more dependent on (dirtier) energy from foreign sources, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, doesn’t seem to matter to Biden. He seems to have decided that such pandering is worth it, if it boosts his reelection efforts. Media outlets have characterized the climate-emergency move as a “reelection gambit” and an attempt at “motivating key constituencies.”
Biden’s actions have already greatly damaged the global market for U.S. energy, as the resulting political uncertainty greatly reduces investment in the industry. That’s a major problem, given that the U.S. is directly or indirectly involved in major conflicts in Israel, the Red Sea, Iran, and Ukraine — and the American military runs on American energy.
This strategically crippling proposal would be sadly of a piece with other Biden policies that have caused wavering U.S. allies to reconsider cozying up to the Kremlin and Beijing, weakened what was recently one of America’s most booming industries, and helped increase American energy prices.
Energy prices have soared under Biden’s tenure, outpacing even rising inflation rates to hit Americans right in the wallet. Since Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, electricity prices have soared almost 30 percent, rising 13 times faster than the previous seven-year average, according to the Wall Street Journal. Now that’s a potential emergency.