by Guy K. Mitchell, Jr., American Thinker:
After President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he began a series of trips around the world to apologize for American hegemony. His topics included apologizing to the Muslim world for the War on Terror, to Europe for American arrogance in foreign and economic policy, to the countries in the Americas for not engaging our neighbors, and for the mistakes of the CIA in interrogation techniques in Guantanamo that led to the “loss of American moral authority” throughout the world.
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On October 1, 2012, the American author and political commentator Thomas Sowell wrote an op-ed article that summarized President Obama’s world tour:
What did it accomplish? It brought the United States down a peg, in the eyes of the world, something that he has sought to do in many other ways. These bows (to foreign leaders) were perfectly consistent with his view of a maldistribution of power and prestige internationally, just as his domestic agenda reflects a felt need for a redistribution of wealth and power within American society. Nor is it surprising that he imposes draconian restrictions on industrial activities in the United States, in the name of fighting “global warming,” while accepting the fact that Third World nations that are beginning to industrialize will generate far more pollution than any restrictions in America can possibly offset. That is another example of international redistribution — and payback for perceived past oppressions or exploitation of the West against the non-West. So is replacing pro-Western governments in the Middle East with Islamic extremist governments.
Do these words, written over ten years ago, sound prescient today? I think so. President Joe Biden has continued to pursue the agenda that President Obama developed during his administration.
On January 20, 2021, President Biden canceled the permit for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would have delivered around 1 million barrels of Canadian crude oil a day to U.S. refiners. In his executive order, President Biden stated, “Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration’s economic and climate imperatives.” On January 27, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order announcing a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands and in offshore waters. On April 16, 2021, at President’s Biden’s direction, secretary of the interior Deb Haaland revoked policies in Secretarial Order 3398 established by the Trump administration, including rejecting “American Energy Independence” as a goal.
In early September 2023, the Biden administration canceled all the seven remaining outstanding oil and gas leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, stating, “As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for all ages.” In late September 2023, the Biden administration announced that the congressionally mandated five-year plan for offshore oil drilling included just three sales, all in the Gulf of Mexico — the lowest number in any five-year plan since the government began publishing them in 1980. In addition to establishing regulations to limit oil and gas production in the U.S., President Biden has declared large areas of land in the U.S. “off limits” for fossil fuel production in the energy-rich Permian Basin of the Southwestern U.S. to protect wildlife such as the Greater Prairie Chicken. During his term in office, President Biden has done far more than any president in U.S. history to eliminate U.S. energy independence.
Why?
The U.S. has become the most powerful nation in the world in part because America possesses a large share of the fossil fuel deposits on Earth. Not only is a nation’s standard of living directly related to its per capita consumption of energy, but energy is a force multiplier. The traditional hegemony that the U.S. has enjoyed the world over the last 75 years, or more, is the result of U.S. domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas to generate electricity and the U.S. electrical power grid that distributes it. Until recently, when regional demand began to exceed supply, the electric power grid in the U.S. was the most economical and reliable of any nation in the world. The forced retirement of coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants (which emit only steam and heat) in the last ten years throughout the U.S. by utilities to placate global warming activists, has rendered the U.S. grid unreliable. The replacement of these fossil fuel and nuclear plants with unreliable, expensive alternative energy generators such as solar voltaic cells and wind turbines will only exacerbate the issue.
The manufacturing capability in basic industries in the U.S. — such as aluminum, iron and steelmaking, transportation, construction machinery and agriculture — depends on reliable, cost-effective energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and electric power. The military-industrial complex in the U.S. has enabled America to manufacture airplanes, warships, tanks, submarines, and missiles that were instrumental in winning World War II, checking communist aggression, and advancing democratic interests throughout the world. The fossil fuel resources that power this military might enable the U.S. to defend freedom throughout the world — and when necessary, impose our will on our adversaries.
Who or what groups would want to see the elimination of the advantages that the U.S. enjoys from fossil fuels? How about China? On December 18, 2023, a news report revealed that “Energy Foundation China,” which has its headquarters in San Francisco, Calif., has significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party and receives most of its funding from the CCP. Its stated goal in the U.S.? “Phasing out coal and electrifying the transportation sector.” It should be noted that China built more coal-fired power plants in 2021 than the rest of the world combined, and China has a near monopoly on the production of lithium-ion battery cells for E.V.s.
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