Biden’s Climate Plans Just Keep Backfiring
As Joe Biden and the world’s elites make plans to hop on their private jets and fly over to Glasgow on Halloween to attend the UN’s COP26 climate summit, Biden’s plans to go green are falling apart. Oil prices are through the roof, gas prices are through the roof, emissions are up, nobody can sell EVs because the supply chains for chips and batteries have broken down and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema killed the administration’s enormously-costly “Clean Power Plan” provisions in the $3.5 trillion budget busting bill over the weekend.
Long before Biden was installed into the presidency, America was already leading the global effort to cut carbon emissions. But America wasn’t doing that mainly by building windmills across the West Texas desert and occupying hundreds of thousands of acres with solar farms; America was doing that by displacing coal-fired power plants with plants fired by cheap, clean-burning natural gas.
The climate alarmists hate to ever admit that fact, mainly because that cheap and plentiful and clean-burning natural gas was being produced from the fracking fields in the major shale plays across the lower 48 states. Yes, friends, the dreaded fracking and horizontal drilling have made it possible for the United States to reduce its carbon emissions to levels not seen since the early 1990s. No other nation on earth has been able to achieve such dramatic reductions.
But the radical climate alarm lobby that funds and effectively owns the Democrat Party today hates fracking, hates natural gas and hates anything it can label as being a “fossil fuel.” So, even as fracking has undeniably facilitated the cleaning of the U.S. emissions profile, the alarmists have continued to demonize and oppose it, because their movement is not based on science, but is instead a very real religious exercise. The dogma matters more than reality.
The problem for Biden and other Democrat politicians, though, is that none of their lofty goals can possibly be achieved without fracking remaining legal and – this is critical – natural gas remaining cheap. Why must gas remain cheap? Because when it becomes more expensive, electric utilities will start switching back to using coal. These huge utilities are always going to want to rely on the cheapest fuel available.
Well, guess what? During Biden’s 9 months in office and in large part due to his policy choices, the price for natural gas in the U.S. has essentially doubled. As a result, we had the spectacle on Monday of CNN reporting that big electric utilities are now switching back to dirty old coal.
Here’s an excerpt from that story:
New York (CNN Business)In a blow to the climate movement, US power companies are ramping up their coal consumption due to surging natural gas prices.
US coal-fired generation is expected to surge by 22% in 2021, the US Energy Information Administration said Monday. That would mark the first annual increase in coal-fired electric power generation since 2014, the EIA said.
Coal was long the main fuel source for the US power grid — even though its environmental footprint is the largest.
In recent years, utilities ditched coal because of concerns about the climate crisis and due to the abundance of very cheap natural gas. US coal consumption fell in 2019 for the sixth straight year, dropping to the lowest level since 1964, as natural gas prices fell to record lows.
Yet this trend has reversed in recent months because natural gas prices have spiked, making coal more competitive.
The EIA report said coal power generation is rising this year because of “significantly higher natural gas prices and relatively stable coal prices.” The delivered cost of natural gas to US power plants has averaged $4.93 per million British thermal units this year, more than double 2020’s price, the EIA said.
This comes after US power plants have retired nearly one-third of their generating capacity at coal plants since 2010.
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Joe Biden has been wrong about literally everything across his entire half-century in Washington, DC. So, why would it surprise anyone that his energy and environment-related policy choices have all gone so terribly wrong as well?
Good luck in Glasgow, Joe. You’re gonna need it.
Published at Tue, 19 Oct 2021 06:44:53 -0700
