Biden’s Green Energy Policy Should Be Suspended During Crisis

By Richard Schulman

The single Biden administration policy that is the most damaging to the US and other nations is its green policy of fossil fuel suppression. The Biden-Democratic policy is based on climate science that has been debunked from a number of angles, including two relatively new ones discussed here (the prevalence of greater warmth at other times in earth’s history and the non-dominant effect of CO2 on temperature). The green policy and questionable science have been kept alive, however, by the same progressive media that shamefully claimed for years that former President Trump was a Russian agent and Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian plant.

The Biden-Pelosi policy of encouraging fossil-fuel unaffordability and of funding only the most expensive and unreliable energy sources – solar and wind — has provoked 1970s levels of inflation, raised food and transportation prices, benefited our enemies, and harmed our friends.

Even if progressive claims regarding the supposed harm that fossil-fuel use is doing to the planet were true – which they aren’t – the administration’s green policy should at least be temporarily suspended. Ending inflation, product shortages, and Russian fossil-fuel dominance requires emergency action — a return to the “all azimuth” energy policies of the preceding Republican administration. Once the multiple crises have been overcome, Democrats can call for returning to the suspended green programs as well as the expensive new ones they are advocating. The world isn’t going to end because of a year or two’s delay.

Administration’s green policy mainly benefits Putin

The Biden administration’s energy policy is incompetent and incoherent. The administration claims to be opposing Russia’s brutal annexation of Ukraine by hamstringing Russia’s financial system. But the main source of Russia’s wealth and military power is its domination of oil and gas markets. These were previously US dominated. Under the previous Republican administration, the US was what economists call a “price giver” to world markets. All forms of energy were allowed to thrive. Wages and standards of living rose. Energy prices fell. Inflation was minimal.

But now, under a progressive Congress and President, the US is a “price taker.” Rather than produce fossil energy out of the wealth of US soil and offshore areas, the Biden administration entreats its enemies and non-friends to supply it with oil and gas. They contemptuously refuse and draw closer to Russia.

Europe and other countries cannot fully wean themselves from Russian oil and gas without an assist from US oil and gas production and exports. By refusing to lift its suppression of US fossil fuel production and transportation, President Biden, Mrs. Pelosi, and Mr. Schumer condemn Europe and the rest of the world to continued dependency on Putin’s oil and gas, by which he funds his Ukrainian killing machine.

CO2 doesn’t dominate climate, but more has been a blessing

What makes an even stronger case for emergency suspension of green policies is the falsity of green claims that CO2 has controlled earth’s climate throughout its entire history and that global warming is harmful. While the earth has become slightly warmer from the combustion of fossil fuels, it’s not a problem for the foreseeable future but rather a hidden blessing. The modestly increased CO2 has boosted agricultural and forest productivity. This has greatly helped feed, house, and warm the world’s growing population.

Too much CO2 today? Not at all! Life has thrived and evolved, through ice ages and inter-glacial warming periods, in terrestrial environments with much higher atmospheric CO2 levels than at present, with the single exception of the Carboniferous period around 300 million years ago, when CO2 levels were close to today’s. (graphic from William Happer papers and presentations)

What most people don’t know is that temperatures warmer than present have prevailed during much of earth’s history. “[M]ost of earth’s history is believed to have been dominated by somewhat higher temperatures than exist today,” Robert Rohli and Anthony Vega, authors of Climatology, a standard textbook in the climate field, write.

Global warming promoters hide this by featuring graphs with curated data ranges that show CO2 and temperature zooming upward at the right edge of the graph. Longer data ranges would show the seeming surge in temperatures and CO2 to be mere blips when shown in proper context. It is often claimed, for example, that present temperatures and CO2 levels are the highest in the past 800,000 years. But as a recent article in Nature points out, contemporary temperatures were exceeded during two previous inter-glacials: 128,000 to 123,000 years ago and arguably as recently 10,000 to 6,000 years ago.

The “faint young sun paradox” and other CO2 / temperature decouplings

But the green scientific case for CO2 dominance of climate gets even worse when viewed from the perspective of earth’s over four billion year history. The first third of that history comprised the age of “the faint young sun paradox.” The sun’s output was 70% of its present irradiance (a characteristic of yellow dwarf stars of which our sun is an example). Why didn’t earth freeze solid then? It wasn’t CO2 that kept earth warm but the greenhouse gas methane, produced by a family of anaerobic bacteria, the methanogens.

CO2 and temperature were also decoupled from each other at other important periods in earth’s history:

• During the Cretaceous period, when CO2 fell but the temperature held steady;
• At the end of the Ordovician, when temperature plunged while CO2 rose;
• In the Silurian, when temperature rose sharply while CO2 fell sharply;
• And in the first half of the Devonian, when CO2 peaked quickly and dropped as quickly, while temperature remained unchanged.

Even during the 20^th century there have been discrepancies between earth’s temperature and CO2 levels that can’t be explained by the theory of CO2 as the controlling climate driver. Global warming advocates seek to explain the cooling trend from 1940 to 1975 by sulphate aerosols and volcanic activity reflecting solar energy back into space. Only green advocates are permitted to arbitrarily depart from the CO2 ranch.

Non-green climate scientists, the so-called climate skeptics — realize that climate is determined by multiple causes in complex not yet fully understood interactions. They have more sense than to try to predict temperature out to the year 2250 or 2300, given present limited understanding, or to expend trillions of US taxpayers dollars in the face of such ignorance.

Numerous natural causes of climate change but moderate effects

Greens are amiss in attributing climate change wholly or even predominately to CO2. There are many causes of climate change besides CO2. Among the most important are:

• continental drift;
• geological phenomena, such as weathering;
• biosphere-initiated changes;
• Milankovitch cycles;
• changes in solar irradiance;
• cosmic rays;
• volcanism;
• cloud physics;
• methane emissions from fjords and deep oceans, etc., and
• human activities other than fossil fuel combustion, such as changes land management practices (building cities, altering river basins, planting or cutting down of forests and jungles.

Earth has been blessed with a surprisingly narrow temperature range throughout its four billion plus years of history. Textbook writers Rohli and Vega, mentioned earlier, write that “[E]arth’s average temperature has remained within a range of perhaps 15 C° (27 F°) for most, if not all geologic history. This implies that even global-scale shifts in mean environmental conditions, from ice ages to ice-free conditions on earth, have occurred within a range of temperature variability that is smaller than the summer to winter temperature difference at most locations outside the tropics.”

Warmer temperatures than present have been a planetary norm, not some fearsome anomaly, and life has done just fine with much warmer temperatures than at present.

Given these and other criticisms of the science behind the Biden administration’s expensive green policy, the harmful effect the policy has been having on prices, and the fact that its continuation is enriching an enemy with whom the US is in proxy combat, it should be self-evident that the Biden administration should suspend all green policy expenditures for now as an emergency measure. This would also improve the Democratic Party’s not so bright electoral prospects in November.