A bit over a decade ago, as gasoline prices topped four dollars per gallon in some parts of the country, the President informed us that the "drill, baby, drill" crowd could not math.
We can't just drill our way out of the problem.
Yet, somehow, we appear to have done exactly that. First ignored, then decried by the Left's energy scolds, the fracking revolution that began in the summer of 2008 started paying real dividends. Across the next decade, the US accounted for 60% of the world's "new oil production, and by 2019 our net exports exceeded our net imports. While "energy independence" is a complicated phrase, clearly we were on a path to relative liberty from the vagaries of and manipulations by other nations.
Partisans want to point at presidents, either in praise or in criticism, but the reality is that both Obama and Trump were beneficiaries of private sector innovation. Obama did try to move against fracking, but got rebuked by the courts for exceeding his authority (I laugh every time I recall Senator Obama railing against executive orders). Trump, to his credit, cleared away some regulatory obstacles, but many people give him *too much* credit for cheap gasoline - gas prices had bottomed out before he took office. Obama was correct in arguing that oil prices are a global phenomenon, but he either missed the significance of or simply dismissed the impact that increasing domestic production could have. Of course, being beholden to the green suicide cult doesn't help matters.
That cult, held at (baying) bay during the Trump years, apparently brainwashed our current dotard in chief without anyone really noticing. Biden promptly put oil and gas are back on the 'naughty' list. Worse, he demonstrated his own inability to math with an absurd edict to reduce government carbon emissions by 65% in 8 years and to have an all-electric government vehicle fleet by 2035.
The greens continue to peddle a delusional future wherein renewables, i.e. wind and solar, with a dabbling of hydropower and (even more idiotically) no nuclear power, power everything. Delusional, in that the numbers simply don't add up. Not even close. Not even in the same state, let alone city or ballpark. The money isn't there, the metals and other resources aren't there, the real estate isn't there, the production capacity isn't there... and above all else, the cooperation isn't there.
As in, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (collectively, the BRICS), and the rest of the developing world are not going to travel down the forced-decarbonization path with the West.
Sure, they'll chirp their agreement, they'll sign on for various (voluntary and discardable) accords (that won't amount to a hill of beans anyway) that put far more burden on the West than on them.
Sure, they'll sell the West the rare earths and other resources needed to build the tens of thousands of square miles of solar panels and million windmills the West will need to replace that gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.
Sure, they'll continue to sell oil and gas to the nations who've opted for energy suicide over the interests of their citizens.
And, *of course* they'll take advantage of the West's self-inflicted political hamstringing.
Russia has massed 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border, with expectations that the number will grow to 175,000. They're not doing this for fun. Germany, which started shutting down its nuclear plants a decade ago, just shut down three more a couple weeks ago despite the Continent being in energy crisis and its citizens being crushed by soaring energy prices.
Germany, already dependent on Russia for a third of its natural gas, is spiking another giant Russian hypodermic needle, Nord Stream 2, into its vein.
Does anyone think that Germany will risk roiling the Russian Bear over a Ukraine invasion? Does anyone think that Germany will sit quietly while other European nations move in response to such an incursion?
America could have been in a position to promise Germany with natural gas deliveries should Putin cut deliveries, but *no*, we have to green-suicide as well. The Democrats failed to ram through their Build Back Better bullshit, but they've got a year's worth of mischief-making[7 time left before the voters give Congress to the opposition, and forcing the nation into a green hell of rolling blackouts, expensive energy, and battery-powered everything seems to be much higher on their list of priorities than inflation, the supply chain problems, the border crisis, or countless other issues that actually affect Americans' lives.
I don't care what your views on global warming are. It doesn't matter if you are a true-believer, a doomsday-cultist, a concerned citizen, a lukewarmist, a skeptic, or a conspiracist. What matters is that, even if the worst predictions are correct, the current policy approach is flat-out wrong - colossally so. The Paris Accord won't make a hill-of-beans difference,
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a carbon-free energy economy cannot simply be mandated into existence, and even if all the West hopes to magically achieve could be accomplished, the rest of the world isn't walking that path. Yet, it's more important, apparently, to make the obviously doomed failure so that our domestic greens can feel good about themselves even as they (well, not them, they're rich enough) suffer pointless privation.
Our leaders are not only dooming us to more expensive lives and reduced living standards, they're handing the keys to the kingdom to nations we *know* will all too happily use them against us.
A footnote. I didn't touch on Taiwan, for brevity's sake. I didn't touch on the abandonment of all we who believe in liberty value, via CRT, woke, DEI, social justice, and the like, for brevity's sake. I didn't go deep into Biden's train-wreck of a press conference, for brevity's sake. The West's slo-mo suicide is evident even without deep-dives into these and more. There's enough poison in the green energy cup alone to get the job done.