Re: Another sneaky Biden energy move

On 26 Feb 2022, Lefty Lundquist <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> Biden is a lying piece of shit.

President Biden has done more to promote green energy than any other 
president in US history. It’s ironic that he remains remarkably bound to 
fossil fuels, in ways he probably hopes nobody notices.

Biden’s entire energy agenda during the last three years has paired the 
overt promotion of renewables with a covert effort to keep fossil fuels 
plentiful and cheap. The latest example is the Biden administration’s Jan. 
26 decision to temporarily suspend the approval of new facilities for 
exporting natural gas. Current facilities will continue to operate, 
without any limit on exports.

The pause will let the Energy Department study the impact of surging US 
natural gas exports on the climate, domestic energy prices, national 
security concerns, and other factors. The review will take several months, 
followed by the usual comment period. You won’t go broke betting the farm 
that an outcome will come in 2025, well after the November elections.

In one regard, a review makes sense. The fracking revolution that kicked 
off around 2010 generated a massive boom in US fossil fuel production, 
which has made the United States the world’s biggest oil and gas producer. 
US law limited energy exports until President Barack Obama signed 
legislation and changed other rules broadly allowing oil and gas exports. 
Starting in 2015, gas exports soared. The Biden administration now says 
the rules for approving export facilities are outdated and need to account 
for the nearly fivefold rise in gas exports since 2014.

But there’s also a likely political angle when a president makes a 
controversial policy change in an election year. Environmental groups 
lobbied hard for the pause on new gas-export facilities, and they declared 
victory when the White House made the decision. So maybe Biden is 
reinvigorating his pitch to environmentally minded voters, who skew young 
and want to see more forceful action to banish the source of greenhouse 
gases causing global warming.

There could also be another target: keeping American energy prices low. 
Drillers often say that robust exports create an incentive to produce more 
gas, which in turn keeps domestic supplies abundant and prices low. But 
that may be wishful thinking. A 2023 analysis by the US Energy Information 
Administration found that “higher [gas] exports results in upward pressure 
on US natural gas prices and lower [gas] exports results in downward 
pressure.” It’s also true that gas prices in other markets, such as Europe 
and Asia, are considerably higher than in the United States, which creates 
an obvious incentive for American producers to sell outside the country 
where they can make more money.

So Biden might be making sure there’s no uptick in US energy prices while 
he’s running for reelection. Natural gas prices get far less attention 
than gasoline prices, but they’re arguably more important because natural 
gas powers 40% of the nation’s electricity generation and 60% of home 
heating. “It seems likely,” Kurt Cobb wrote recently on OilPrice.com, 
“that someone whispered into the administration's ear something about the 
possibility of much higher domestic prices in the coming years if the US 
LNG [liquified natural gas] export juggernaut is allowed to continue.”

US natural gas prices did spike in 2022, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 
led to a sharp reduction of Russian gas exports to Europe and a scramble 
by other gas exporters to fill the gap. US natural gas prices are now back 
to the relatively low levels typical from 2015 to 2021.

Electricity costs have jumped, however, and stayed there. Since Biden took 
office, electricity costs have risen 27%. That’s a stealthy source of 
inflation, which has been Biden’s biggest economic problem. Higher 
electricity prices boost consumers’ utility bills, while also making it 
more expensive for businesses to produce goods and keep the lights on 
(literally). Businesses normally try to pass cost increases on to 
consumers.

When inflation spiked in 2022 and gasoline prices hit $5 per gallon, 
Biden's approval rating dropped sharply. Overall inflation is almost back 
to normal levels, but Biden clearly recognizes the risk that high energy 
prices pose to his political future. Since 2022, Biden has taken a variety 
of measures to lower energy prices: selling oil from the US reserve, 
asking Saudi Arabia to produce more oil, and even encouraging more energy 
production by ne'er-do-well nations Iran and Venezuela. Biden's 
credibility with environmentalists comes from the massive green energy 
plan he signed into law in 2022, but Biden's overall popularity relies far 
more on the cost of fossil fuels we're still dependent on.

There's good reason for Biden to retain the pro-export policy that began 
under Obama, continued under President Trump, and remained in place for 
Biden’s first three years in office. In a Jan. 26 analysis, the Eurasia 
Group argued that ongoing high levels of American gas exports are an 
important lifeline to Europe and a key lever of US power in other parts of 
the world, including Asia. Russia would clearly love more influence in 
those parts of the world, and the availability of American energy as an 
alternative to Russia's exports is a barrier to Russia's malign ambitions.

So maybe the Biden review will sound the all-clear, with a few permit 
denials to appease the climate lobby, if Biden wins reelection. But if 
evidence mounts that energy exports are raising costs for Americans, Biden 
won’t be the last president to have a problem with that.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/another-sneaky-biden-energy-move-
182802772.html