Biden’s Climate Emergency: Green Policies on Steroids?
By Tilak Doshi
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. According to Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, 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”?
Since its inception, the Biden Administration has done just about everything to wage a regulatory onslaught on U.S. 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.
Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research published a detailed list of over 200 actions pursued by the Biden administration “deliberately designed to make it harder to produce [conventional] energy here in America.” Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian, in commenting on the list, said that “the sheer number of efforts to restrict, hamper, harass and extort fossil fuel producers is breathtaking.”
There is no easing in the determination to continue the regulatory onslaught on oil and gas. In what is effectively seen as the Environmental Protection Agency’s “plan to ration electricity”, the Wall Street Journal wryly observed on Friday: “The Biden Administration’s regulations are coming so fast and furious that its hard even to keep track, but we are trying.” The Journal said the EPA “proposed its latest doozy—rules that will effectively force coal plants to shut down while banning new natural-gas plants.”
The EPA’s tightening disposal standards for mercury, wastewater and ash 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. According to Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, it may seem to White House strategists “a really good idea to essentially go to war with the weather” to rally the troops.
When a danger, created by internal or external threats, puts citizens at risk, governments must respond decisively and take action that would be considered excessive during normal times. In an emergency, democratic checks and balances can hamper the government when they need to act quickly. The use of special powers in response to abnormally perilous situations has existed as long as nations have. However, it can also increase the opportunities for abuses of power as democratic constraints on executive power are weakened.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an emergency is “a serious situation or occurrence that happens unexpectedly and demands immediate action”. Since dire failed predictions of climate catastrophe have been with us for over half a century, it is incorrect to cast the climate as being in a state of emergency.
But beyond mere etymological incorrectness, the more concerning aspect of proclaiming national emergency is that it excuses executive authority from the constraints of the normal rule of law. It evades public opinion, the checks and balances of legislation, and the censure of constitutional impeachment.
An emergency declaration allows the president to access funds from the Treasury even for purposes that Congress might have specifically rejected, taking away the House’s “power of the purse.” Thus, accountability to the people for the expenditure of their money, the Constitution’s safeguard for imposing popular will on government, is made redundant.
As Greg Weiner reminds us, James Madison’s fifty-eighth of The Federalist Papers states that the House’s “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon, with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
According to the Congressional Records Office, the U.S. National Emergency Act—enacted in 1976—was explicitly proclaimed at least 30 times since it was first used by the Carter administration. The prolific use of emergency proclamations by presidential fiat makes it more likely that it ends up protecting abuses of executive authority rather than in any prudential use of measures to attend to real emergencies.
Already with a record number of executive orders and regulatory overreach by agencies such as the EPA, a climate emergency declaration will allow the Biden administration to seize even more powers without restraint from the House’s control over the appropriations process. Research by the Brennan Center for Justice catalogs 123 statutory authorities that become available to the president when he declares a national emergency. According to the earlier cited Bloomberg report, a proclaimed “climate emergency” could be used “to curtail crude exports, suspend offshore drilling and curb greenhouse gas emissions…and throttle the movement of oil and gas on pipelines, ships and trains.”
Alongside this veto over the extraction, processing and use fossil fuels in the country, the deluge of subsidies and mandates to support favoured green industries such as solar, wind, electric vehicles and battery technologies will grow even more. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, subsidies for renewable energy producers more than doubled between 2016 and 2022, forming nearly half of all federal energy-related support in that period.
The hidden costs involved with the countless mandates to force “green” initiatives on the public would be a multiple of this. To this should be added the estimated $1 trillion in renewable energy subsidies over the next 10 years. These subsidies, via investment tax credits and other instruments mainly based on debt, will be made available in the egregiously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In an email to Bloomberg, White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said that President Biden has “delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda in history…[he] has treated the climate crisis as an emergency since day one and will continue to build a clean energy future that lowers utility bills, creates good-paying union jobs, makes our economy the envy of the world and prioritizes communities that for too long have been left behind.”
Compare that official response to that of Forbes Media chairman and editor-in-chief Steve Forbes. Declaring that a national climate emergency would “wreck” the U.S. economy, he said “You’re going to pay for it with an even more troubled economy,” adding that Americans will suffer the consequences of “higher energy prices.”
The reader will decide which of the two statements is closer to the mark. But among the more cynical, it may seem that the president is being rather practical. President Biden—and his handlers—are aiming to save his chances for the November election by appealing to the youth convinced of the climate apocalypse and the leftist billionaires who can’t seem to throw enough money for the cause.
This commentary was first published at Forbes on April 28, 2024.
CO2 Coalition Member, Tilak Doshi, Ph.D., has worked in the oil and gas sector as an economist in both private industry and in think tanks, in Asia, the Middle East and the US over the past 25 years. His focus is on global energy developments from the perspective of Asian countries that remain large markets for oil, gas and coal. Dr. Doshi has written extensively on the areas of economic development, environment and energy economics.