The sacrifice of one effective policy with narrow and attainable goals for one that is entirely fanciful is utterly fatuous.
From the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration leaned heavily into America’s newfound status as an energy exporter to weaken Moscow’s geopolitical clout — to its credit. “What we’re doing is supplanting Russian gas,” said Biden’s climate-change envoy, John Kerry, in the spring of 2022. The administration’s goal, Joe Biden insisted, was to help “Europe reduce its dependency on Russian gas as quickly as possible.”
So much for all that.
This week, the Biden administration announced it was delaying a decision to approve a Louisiana liquified-natural-gas-export venture (LNG) that would have been America’s most productive energy-export hub. The announcement would “shock the global energy market” and “send a devastating signal to our allies that they can no longer rely on the United States,” said a representative of one of the LNG exporters about the administration’s indecision.
That’s not just the self-interested bluster from a rapacious capitalistic enterprise. According to Politico, America’s allies are “spooked,” and for good reason:
The reassessment of how the Department of Energy approves gas export permits, first reported by POLITICO, threatens to stall projects that Europe depends on to meet its energy demands while it tries to counter Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s just the latest example of how U.S. policy priorities — in this case, reducing reliance on carbon-polluting fossil fuels — can create headaches for European leaders and even frustrate the transatlantic allies’ shared security goals.
Biden’s decision to forego one of America’s foremost soft-power weapons in the fight against violent Russian expansionism has been rightly interpreted as a sop to far-left climate activists for whom the sacrifice of American power is no sacrifice at all. After all, the environmentalist left was up in arms over U.S. energy exports from the outset of Russia’s war.
“There is no doubt that Biden’s apparent capitulation to the gas industry has opened the door for these companies to continue to profit off the backs of those suffering in Ukraine, those living close to new gas infrastructure in the US, and the millions affected by climate change globally,” said one myopic representative of the environmentalist consensus in 2022. That, it must be said, is asinine. The only people leveraging the “suffering in Ukraine” for their own interests in this equation are those who would preserve Europe’s dependence on Russia for energy exports at Ukraine’s expense.
Biden’s cave to the environmentalist left will do him no favors. It demonstrates his lack of commitment to the effort to beat back the Russian advance — an issue on which he has staked national prestige and his own administration’s clout. It will not appease climate-change activists because they cannot be appeased. They do not want a marginal decline in the nation’s overall carbon footprint — they want rapid de-industrialization, the success of which they measure in the relative frequency of extreme weather events. Chasing after their approval is a fool’s errand. The sacrifice of one effective policy with narrow and attainable goals for one that is entirely fanciful is utterly fatuous. The Biden administration must reverse itself. And soon.