Declaring a national climate emergency would “wreck” the U.S. economy, Steve Forbes said “You’re going to pay for it with an even more troubled economy.”
According to a Bloomberg report last week, White House officials have renewed discussions about declaring a national “climate emergency”. The intent is not new. Six days after President Biden’s inauguration, the then newly minted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the president to declare an emergency over the “climate crisis.” In 2022, the administration considered a similar emergency declaration after negotiations on “clean energy” legislation had stalled.
As the US presidential election campaigning heats up, Biden’s poll numbers are flagging across the battleground states. It may seem to White House strategists “a really good idea to essentially go to war with the weather” to rally the troops. Or is this too cynical a view? With the incessant coverage of extreme weather in the mainstream media, might not President Biden and his advisors be convinced of a true “climate emergency”?The Regulatory Onslaught on Fossil Fuels Since January 2020
Since its inception, the Biden administration has done just about everything to wage war on US oil and gas (coal of course is beyond the pale). In an interview with The Weather Channel in August, President Biden said that “practically speaking” he had already declared a climate emergency. He had a point. On attaining office, the president immediately unleashed a series of executive orders to reverse his predecessor’s strategy of “energy independence”. In short order, he revoked permits for the Keystone $7 billion XL oil pipeline, suspended oil leasing in Alaska, halted oil and gas leases on federal land, and even invoked the Endangered Species Act to block energy resource development on private lands in the West.
The EPA’s tightening mercury, wastewater and ash disposal standards will make it impossible for coal and natural gas-fuelled power stations to operate unless carbon capture and sequestration technologies become economical. The agency would have us believe that the plunging costs of wind, solar and battery technologies will rapidly displace demand for fossil fuels which currently account for 82% of the world’s primary energy supply according to BP’s latest annual statistical bulletin. It is one with the IEA’s “magical thinking” on a “net zero” future which assumes unrealistically optimistic forecasts of new innovations and technologies that are yet commercially unproven.
