Biden Policies Making America Weaker

October 19, 2021

From day one of his administration, when he cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, President Biden has made it clear that the job-killing Green New Deal takes precedence over economic growth and opportunity. But in pursuing policies that take reliable and affordable energy options off the table, the Biden administration has actually been setting the table for a feast that America’s geopolitical foes are poised to enjoy.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead points out how President Biden is now facing tough choices about which vision he will embrace:

President Biden may soon have to choose between his climate policy and his overall national strategy.

The problem is not just that the energy shortage and price surges threaten to drive a wedge between green activists and middle- and working-class voters struggling with high energy bills …

The real problem is that the green agenda as currently conceived is an effective machine for undermining the economic and political power of the democratic world and boosting the influence of precisely the authoritarian powers President Biden has made it his mission to oppose. By artificially depressing fossil-fuel production and investment in the democratic world faster than renewables and other fuels can fill the gap, Biden policy promotes a multiyear, multitrillion-dollar windfall for countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

For radical environmentalists, making energy more expensive is a feature, not a bug, of their domestic agenda. As a result, they empower and enrich dictators who are not going to abide by the same standards, and they turn their back on one of our country’s greatest recent accomplishments – as Mead reports:

America’s greatest single achievement of the past decade was replacing the Middle East as the swing producer in world energy production, shifting a critical lever of economic power from authoritarian monopolists to market-driven capitalists. To throw this achievement away means, among other things, the return of the Middle East to the center of the American foreign policy agenda …

It did not take a crystal ball to see where these GND policies are going to take us as a nation. This radical green agenda is lowering standards of living, making energy more expensive, and making America weaker. That’s a vision that no one should support.