Nutter's Washington

Desparate Biden Taps Strategic Petroleum Reserve

President Biden--Mr. Climate Change-- has ordered in an act of total political desperation, 50 million barrels of oil be released from America’s strategic reserve to help bring down energy costs. Since he can not get the OPEC nations to increase their production after humiliating begging them, he has decided to tap our own domestic supplies in storage in a futile effort to reduce gasoline prices.

Whoa, wait a minute, I thought fossil fuels were verboten and inflation was a temporary problem.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is an emergency stockpile to preserve access to oil in case of natural disasters, national security issues and other extraordinary events. The SPR was created in 1975 as a hedge against the “Energy Crisis” created by the Arab Boycott. The reserves are stored in caverns created in salt domes in Texas and Louisiana, about 600 million barrels.

The Biden administration has argued the reserve is the right tool to help ease the supply problem. However, the amount will not have a significant effect on supply, or any meaningful effect on prices. America uses an average of 20 plus million barrels a day, so the release is about two-and-a-half days of additional supply. Yawn.

Mr. Biden has done everything possible with more to come to discourage domestic oil and gas production. Now, he wants to use the SPR to influence the market and show he is doing something about inflation, a purpose for which it was never intended. Pathetic political gimmickry.

Gore Essay: Climate Change Policy Revisited

Former Vice President Al Gore has written a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone magazine posted online Wednesday in which he criticizes President Obama for failing to take “bold action” on climate change. Gore contends the Obama Administration has made little progress on the issue. The former VP is a strident believer carbon dioxide created from burning fossil fuels is the overwhelming cause of climate change, an undeniable scientific fact according to him. I am not going to debate the science, the reasons of changes in weather, finger pointing at climate change deniers, discuss climate data fabrication or the plight of the polar bears. The interesting question raised: Is Gore right or he is wrong on the President’s actions or lack thereof?

 The history of climate change policy or global warming legislation in this country and attempts to address it are far more complicated and involved than the 7000 words penned by Gore. By way of disclosure, let me say, I worked on climate change legislation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the past 5 years.

Congressional Pyrrhic victory over EPA regulation

The regulation of greenhouse gases (GHG) has been a contentious and divisive issue. The emission of mainly carbon dioxide from fossil fuels use has been blamed as the source for “climate change” by one side and largely dismissed by the other. The current Administration upon taking office 2 years ago supported by a Democrat Congress put forth an aggressive program to regulate GHG through a complex system of emissions ceilings and allowances, known as “cap-and-trade”. The details and history of the program are beyond my comments now but suffice it to say, if enacted into law “cap-and-trade” would have had an enormous impact on energy costs, energy use and energy production. 

 In the last Congress, cap-and-trade legislation fashioned by a Democrat majority passed the House, but failed to move in the heavily Democrat Senate.  As the legislation died, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stepped into the void to promulgate administrative rules to regulate greenhouse gases from major emitters of carbon and carbon equivalents under the guise of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The result of the rules is to impose a quasi-cap-and-trade system by regulatory fiat. EPA’s authority and the validity of the regulations are being challenged in multiple lawsuits. However, this is just the background as the real struggle is about political power.