Democrats and White House officials have pushed for both greater domestic fossil fuel production and less reliance on fossil fuels over the last 24 hours.
“The utilities are coming in and saying, ‘We need this because we’re shifting to clean energy.’ They’re our biggest advocates on this work on the Hill,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said Thursday, Politico reported. “This is not a fight about coal anymore.” [bold, links added]
“It is a challenge about natural gas and infrastructure investments because we don’t want to invest in things that are time-limited,” McCarthy said, Politico reported. “Because we are time-limited.”
However, President Joe Biden announced a deal with the European Union on Friday morning to export an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to member nations in 2022.
The U.S.-EU agreement announcement also suggested additional exports would be reported in 2023.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan added in a call with reporters that U.S. LNG supplies to Europe would grow “not just over the course of years, but over the course of months as well.”
“Of course, that amount will grow over time,” he said.
But Biden noted at a press conference that the deal called for “reducing Europe’s demand for gas overall,” even as the plan itself and Sullivan forecasted greater LNG exports to the continent.
In addition, the president said the Ukraine crisis, which has led to a U.S. ban on Russian oil imports and a promise from EU nations to ditch Russian energy, proved the need for the world to “double-down on our clean energy goals.”
“The strategy that we’re announcing today to address the near term is to reduce demand for fossil fuels — natural gas in particular — and also filling in for natural gas that would have come from Russia in the very near term to avoid people getting cold this winter and next winter before clean energy is deployed at scale,” a senior administration official told reporters during a briefing Friday.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a Democratic-majority U.S. agency that regulates pipelines, made a sudden reversal to a climate policy announced in February.
On Thursday, the commission struck the policy, which mandated a more stringent environmental review of pipelines and other fossil fuel projects, saying it would now consider the policy a “draft.”
“After further consideration, the Commission today designated both documents as draft policy statements on which the Commission is seeking further public comment,” FERC said. “The two draft policy statements will not apply to pending project applications.”
In another reversal, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Thursday that the global transition to clean energy “must be accelerated” during a meeting with the International Energy Agency in Paris.
However, during a March 9 speech at the energy industry CERAWeek conference, Granholm said the U.S. was on “war footing” and needed to “increase short-term supply” of fossil fuels.
Similarly, Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s environment panel, said the U.S. should start drilling for more oil in light of the Ukraine crisis.
“In the short term, yes, we need domestic increase in oil production,” Khanna told Bloomberg on March 16. “And that obviously, is going to not be consistent in the very short term with climate aspirations.”
One day later, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group Khanna is a member of, called for sweeping bans on federal oil and gas leasing.
In response to the crisis, Democrats have pushed for higher taxes on Big Oil and temporary stimulus checks to help Americans pay for higher gasoline prices.
Read rest at Daily Caller
Some think we should go entirely to Wind and Solar Power but after what happened in Texas proves that renewibles can not be relied upon to provide us with a a steady source of power. Maybe Gore and DiCaprio should proving the Hot Air they seem to be full of
The left has, in less than one year, succeeded in abandoning energy independence. They’re hellbent on abandoning the energy that has made us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. They’ve brought back inflation rates and energy poverty that hasn’t been seen since Jimmy Carter. All because fossil fuels recycle life’s basic ingredient CO2? And the media still calls them “Progressive”! God save us from the failure of grade school education and left wing media.
Their using this whole Global Warming/Climate Change as a excuse to bring about A global Government all run by the United nations which is why the UN was created for in the first place
I watched a Senate Energy & Public Works hearing earlier this week titled “challenges of the energy transition in the climate crisis,” or something to that effect. The COMPLETE lack of knowledge of our domestic energy system and purely Ideological bias of (mostly) the Democratic panel members was NAUSEATING. For 2-1/2 hours, you had a bunch of “know nothings” spewing drivel. LOTS of activist “talking points,” very lean on substance. Talk about pushing peas around on your plate! All you can hope is that the current congressional majority doesn’t remain at the “throttles” much longer…
These know-nothings are clueless how wind and solar can possibly replace coal, natural gas and nuclear for producing electricity that we are currently generating. It’s all just hand-waving and they are just certain it will happen. Same with the battery backup needed without any knowledge of the metal resources needed and how those metals will be mined and processed. Or if there’s any way for that to work.