“All of these are unnerving symptoms of how distracted this team are by ideological hobby horses, no matter how many wake-up calls reality arranges for them.”
Imagine being a Biden White House aide tasked with writing tonight’s State of the Union address. Having spent weeks crafting an opus of appeals to Congress over Biden’s “climate” agenda, reality barges in and scrambles the whole build-back-better, ‘our greatest threat is climate change’ narrative. At least, one would think.
Squandering the inheritance of energy dominance, and ushing a U.S. equivalent of Germany’s disastrous energy policies here — with a reliance on China for rare earth-mineral dependent ‘renewables’ more than a Russian pipeline if, yes, increased reliance on Russian oil — now moves from being bizarrely out-of-touch with Americans to absurdly disconnected from reality.
What to do?
All signs are that adjusting to events and scrapping old plans until better times hopefully return was not a consideration. Acknowledging how policy mistakes have brought the world to this week’s deadly and further-perilous point is therefore plainly out of the question.
Pre-SOTU speech trial balloons suggest that Tuesday’s State of the Union speech will labor to style the Biden administration’s obsession with the “climate” and anti-fossil fuel agenda as the rational response to this world thrust before us in recent days. He and his party are too heavily invested in the matter with their base and their donors to let go — just last week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy held its first “roundtable” to examine how science can help fix the problem of people not buying into adopting Europe’s disastrous agenda here.
Instead, expect a lecture oblivious to Europe now lying prostrate — cornered by its own obsession with Green New Deal policies (called “Net Zero” over there) into near-total reliance on a Putin-led Russia to keep the lights and heat on.
The line coming from Europe and the Biden administration was for days a unified one, that hydrocarbons (“fossil fuels”) are clearly bad and the “Ukraine turmoil” shows it’s time to go harder on the windmills-and-sun-catcher fantasy. Apparently, the world only just recently started down that path, and have been insufficiently committed to it or something.
Meanwhile, because real energy infrastructure “would take years,” that’s a no-go. Instead, tonight I call for $X billions to build a nationwide EV charging network by 2030…
White House press secretary Jen Psaki previewed this approach on ABC’s This Week. It should sound vaguely familiar. A mere eight of the past nine presidents have used the State of the Union speech to push expensive governmental interventions in the name of a renewable energy agenda to replace what works and lies underneath American soil in abundance (the virtues of which Trump deviated from the norm to extoll). Tuesday will make that 9 of 10.
In 2011 the Competitive Enterprise Institute took this Punxsutawney policy on, in a video noting the Obama-Biden’s embrace of the tired pose. CEI had some fun with the fact that, a year earlier, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart had also picked up on the same thing if with the endearingly naïve hope that this time, it would be different.
If only this had been explored in a West Wing episode. Alas, here we go again.
Meanwhile, closer to ‘Ground Net-Zero,’ London-based Net Zero Watch titled its February 27, 2022, roundup of news items about energy and environment policy — and the relevant economic and national security impacts — “Putin’s war on Ukraine changes everything.”
It should. However, the same group tweeted out a story quoting Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans declaring that “Putin threatens Ukraine because he wants to divert attention from climate problem”. You see the real threat here in our policymakers’ minds. This echoes sentiments from Biden’s “Special Climate Envoy” John Kerry fretting that Putin’s invasion will distract from Kerry’s imagined “war against climate change.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board captured the moment:
“But Mr. Kerry’s comments aren’t a gaffe. They reveal the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate, and with punishing fossil-fuel production, which has made the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail. The climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful. Every time Mr. Kerry visits Moscow, the boys in the Kremlin must think it’s Christmas.”
Germany has spent the most time and money pushing this agenda and, as is now well-known, is the worst offfor it from an economic and national security perspective. Over the weekend, Germany made several “about-face” announcements giving hope that maybe the dogmatic slow-learners in government there are somewhat teachable. A Monday Journal headline on February 28, 2022, noted, “Germany’s Climate Left Gets Serious: Greens in Berlin start to make responsible energy trade-offs. Is President Biden listening?”.
That said, as of now Germany still plans to shut down three nuclear power plants this week, in favor of more reliance on Putin’s gas.
Pre-SOTU speech trial balloons suggest that Tuesday’s State of the Union speech will labor to style the Biden administration’s obsession with the “climate” and anti-fossil fuel agenda as the rational response to this world thrust before us in recent days. He and his party are too heavily invested in the matter with their base and their donors to let go — just last week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy held its first “roundtable” to examine how science can help fix the problem of people not buying into adopting Europe’s disastrous agenda here.
In Congress, the House Oversight Committee is in the midst of a “year-long” investigation to pursue scapegoats for Congress’s inability to persuade the public to accept the “climate” agenda — guided by consultants provided to it by donors such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar to help steer the subpoenaing enterprise.
Accepting in-kind staff work on its face appears to violate House Rules and federal law. Meanwhile, Biden’s use of the State of the Union is all too typical. All of these are unnerving symptoms of how distracted this team are by ideological hobby horses, no matter how many wake-up calls reality arranges for them.