House Republicans and U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., are right to push ever harder for greater domestic oil and gas production despite President Joe Biden’s hostility against fossil fuels.
Manchin erupted last week when he saw a memo from the Interior Department outlining a higher royalty rate on a lease in Alaska’s Cook Inlet than the one originally considered, all because of what amounted to virtue signaling against climate change. The memo admitted that a lower royalty would “increase the chances” of actual productive use of the lease. And, “If a Cook Inlet prospect would be developed, there would be additional government revenues and greater energy security for the State of Alaska, especially if development of natural gas resources in the Cook Inlet ameliorated the long-term supply challenges facing the Anchorage area.”
Nonetheless, the department settled on a higher royalty rate that ended up deterring investors, all “because of the serious challenges facing the Nation from climate change.”
Manchin, a booster of fossil fuels production in general and of the Cook Inlet exploration in particular, said of the memo, “I am appalled by its contents, which make crystal clear that this administration is literally putting their radical climate agenda ahead of the needs of the people of Alaska and the United States .”
The Biden administration has been notably hostile to lease sales and has deliberately slow-walked permitting. The result, as Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute noted in the Washington Examiner on March 5, is that “Notwithstanding some recent declines, domestic crude oil prices in the United States are about 45% higher than when President Joe Biden was inaugurated … [and] U.S. gasoline prices are about a dollar higher per gallon.”
As Manchin has pushed with at least minor success to force Biden by law to reopen some lease sales the president had canceled, House Republicans last week held hearings on two new bills to streamline permitting processes and another to require the resumption of onshore oil and gas lease sales and provide strict deadlines for offshore offerings.
The bill garnering the most attention came from U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge. His legislation, known (by acronym) as the BUILDER Act, is designed to have environmental assessments conducted more quickly and be easier to review, and also to provide quicker resolution of opponents’ concerns without automatic recourse to lengthy lawsuits.
On a parallel track, Minnesota U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber’s PERMIT-MN Act would streamline permitting for production of key minerals used in green energy technologies. If the Biden eco-warriors really want electric vehicles to be more attractive to buyers, they should want the minerals necessary for their batteries to be able to be put to use more quickly and at less cost.
Finally, U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, would further bolster the track Manchin is on by requiring the Biden administration to resume and expedite onshore and offshore oil, gas, and geothermal lease sales.
All of this makes good sense. Higher energy costs are not only plaguing American working families but are also essentially harming the very environment Biden’s radicals say they want to save. As Zycher notes, “to the extent that overseas production of fossil fuels replaces forgone domestic production, global environmental quality will decline because U.S. environmental standards are the best in the world.”
In other words, if the energy is instead produced where environmental standards are laxer, the carbon “footprint” will actually be greater — thus, according to the eco-warriors’ own theories, causing more, not less, climate change.
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