The battle cry and sacred cow of the American and European left is the climate warming, climate cooling, climate change hysteria that has become a war on all types of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, renewable energy technology is not sufficiently advanced to be able to replace fossil fuels as the dominant domestic and global energy source. The United States, given its decades long effort to replace coal fired electrical generation with significantly cleaner burning domestically sourced natural gas, is the most environmentally efficient large developed economy in the world. Instead of endorsing a shift to renewable energy sources in a logically planned transition, that recognizes technological realities, via clean burning natural gas as a pivot energy option, they have done everything in their power to restrict domestic production and transportation of North American oil and gas without any concern for inflation and national security. The left’s blind adherence to an apoplectic “green energy” agenda enforced by Biden’s administrative shutdown of North American pipeline projects and the regulatory strangulation of oil and gas permitting on public/offshore parcels defies all security and economic logic.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, going on right now, has put a spotlight on the unbelievable stupidity of the Biden Administration relating to the linkage of energy policy, the national economy, and global as well as domestic security. Coupled with their insane immigration, education, spending and monetary policies (money injected into the economy), it is painfully obvious that the political left has gotten virtually nothing right since Biden took office. The sad message to the American public relating to the radical inflation and economic uncertainty the country is dealing with, the Russian aggression in Ukraine, and immigration mess at the Southern Border were all totally predictable and totally avoidable.
Aside from the immigration and education issues (including critical race theory), which are long
run socialist agenda driven policy disasters created by the political left, the remaining problems created by the Biden administration can all be classified as “deja vu”. Other than the collapse of the Soviet Union as a base case, historical examples of Russian aggression are restricted in this paper to the post 2000 period, in which three shorter time periods are strikingly similar. The collapse of the Soviet Union was attributable to an over extension of domestic overhead facing Russia holding the Post WWII Warsaw Pact together and the expensive 1980’s arms race with the United States. I used to refer to the dilemma faced by Russia at the time as “being in a game of marbles with no marbles.” The collapse of the Soviet Union was due to the inefficiency of the communist/socialist state —-NOT ENOUGH MARBLES. The American and European left, starting primarily with the Obama Administration, in an ongoing irrational pursuit of environmental dogma, supplied Putin and Russia all the MARBLES needed to attack and annex parts and pieces of neighboring countries. Russia exports at least five million barrels per day of crude oil (as well as much of Russia’s natural gas exports), much of which is purchased by European countries.
There were sharp increases in crude oil prices leading up to the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 as well as in the 2011-2014 period culminating in the annexation of Crimea and starting in 2021 with Biden’s outright war on oil and gas production in America. Russia and Vladimir Putin have been, and are continuing to be supplied with MARBLES to play with. The West was unnecessarily weak in dealing with Russia leading up to and after the war in Georgia, with Obama’s and Biden’s “leading from behind”, naive “reset with Russia” taking the prize. This pattern of energy dollars funding Russia’s wars coupled with American and European left’s weakness leading up to the Georgian invasion has proven to be the road map and playbook for Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea and the present (2022) invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s war with Georgia resulted in two break away regions effectively occupied by Russia, which is identical to the Ukraine situation resulting from the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea. Russian aggression has been minimal during periods of lower oil prices (2015-2017) and when American oil and gas production was robust and growing during the Trump Administration (2017-2020).
The United States, with its vast oil and gas resources, is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world, despite the fact American production has been radically restricted by Biden’s green energy war on fossil fuels. One of the American left’s weapons aimed at oil and gas production, other than permitting and regulation, is the burden placed on the financing of oil and gas production through ESG funding (environmental, social and governance) which seeks to demonize oil and gas production, while casting a blind eye on China’s humanitarian misbehavior and heavy weapons producers that are needed to counter the wars instigated by hostile nations funded by oil and gas sales to America and Europe – pretty damn stupid. This left wing insanity has not only played a dominant role in the present severe inflation plaguing the American economy (highest price ever for gasoline), it is a source of funding Putin’s ability to wage war. If American and Canadian oil and gas producers never had to face the Biden Administration’s regulatory and permitting roadblocks to produce, transport and export oil and gas, North American crude oil and natural gas production would also be significantly higher and the price of all energy consumed in North America be significantly lower. Consequently, North America oil and gas production would be in a surplus position and American producers would still be setting the price of crude on the margin as the swing producer as during the Trump Administration. European dependence on Russian oil and gas would not be so severe and Russia may have been too financially challenged to pursue hostile adventures.
American oil and gas producers are the most efficient, environmentally conscious producers in the world and American oil and gas are the exceptionally clean burning fossil fuels. It is clearly frustrating to experts in the oil and gas industry to see Biden in a blatant fit of agenda driven stupidity, court Iran and Venezuela, two totalitarian regimes who are our sworn enemies to increase oil exports of oil inferior to the oil that can be produced in the United States. In recent years, Europe has also been consumed by environmental extremism, with Germany having planned to radically reduce nuclear and coal fired power generation prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all of which is now being reconsidered, along with an expansion of renewable energy and a push to purchase LNG (liquid natural gas) from alternative sources. Instead of endorsing a shift to renewable energy sources in a logically planned transition, that recognizes technological realities, via clean burning natural gas as a pivot energy option, they have done everything in their power to restrict domestic production and transportation of North American oil and gas (including LNG terminals) without any concern for inflation and national (and NATO) security. The American left, in its recalcitrant myopic green energy bifocals, will block that reality during the remainder of the Biden Administration regardless of the global security consequences of their actions.
In summation, it would seem as though the historical pattern of the consequential results of the American left’s errors relating to energy policy, monetary policy and spending would have given them a hint that their blind agenda driven policies are damaging to domestic and global security as well as to the domestic and global economies (also see “Can Biden and the Democrats Really Be That Stupid” and “Macroeconomics-Money-Spending-Inflation” posted in www.georgeeconomics.com).
A fitting phrase that applies in this sad situation: “A dumb person learns from his or her own mistakes, a smart person learns from somebody else’s.” The Left does not even learn from its own mistakes – the Left never learns!