A ‘war on American energy’? So why is oil production near record highs?

By Catherine Rampell    columnist| www.washingtonpost.com/opinions  October 3, 2023

 For years, Republicans have claimed that Democrats have waged a “war” on fossil fuels.

This narrative has featured prominently in Republican presidential debates and in front-runner Donald Trump’s remarks about striking autoworkers, among other settings. Apparently (at least according to Republicans), Democrats such as President Biden have used every tool at their disposal to squelch fossil fuel production and consumption. Further, they have destroyed the “energy independence” briefly achieved by the Trump administration, when, for the first time on record, the United States exported more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported.

As former vice president and now presidential contender Mike Pence framed the issue in last week’s debate: “On day one, Joe Biden declared a war on energy, which was no surprise, because when Joe Biden ran for president, he said he was going to end fossil fuels, and they’ve been working overtime to do that ever since.”

It sounds just awful. But I have good news for Republicans: U.S. fossil fuel exploitation is pretty much booming. Here are a few stats from this supposed war’s front lines:

• After plummeting early in the pandemic, U.S. crude oil production has been climbing and is now back near record highs. That’s according to data released Friday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency also projects that oil production will hit new all-time highs next year.
• S. natural gas production has also been hovering around record highs.
• To date, the Biden administration has approved slightly more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands than the Trump administration had over the same periods of their respective presidencies, according to Texas A&M professor Eric Lewis. (My Post colleague Harry Stevens has previously covered this in depth.)

If “energy independence” means exporting more than you import, we’ve achieved it in spades. The United States has been exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imports for 22 straight months now, far longer than was the case under Trump.

If this is what waging war on fossil fuels looks like, Democrats apparently aren’t very good at it. But in reality, of course, the war on fossil fuels is a pure political invention. Biden and other Democrats are hewing much more closely to the Republican pro-fossil-fuel agenda than either side would like to admit — at exactly the moment we need to push toward the future.

Even those Democrats who once seemed interested in using federal policy levers to reduce demand or production of fossil fuels long ago lost their nerve. When voters were angry about high gas prices last year, for instance, Democratic lawmakers berated energy companies for producing too little oil, not too much. Biden often did the same from his bully pulpit.

So much for “Keep it in the ground,” a slogan embraced by environmentalists and (wrongly) ascribed to Democratic politicians.

Policy wonks — liberal and conservative alike — still often advocate taxing carbon emissions. That’s because economists regard carbon taxes as the most efficient way to nudge people away from purchasing carbon-intensive products, and to incentivize innovation in alternative technologies. But carbon taxes have virtually no support among anyone in elected office, including Democrats.

Even though multiple senior officials in Biden’s administration once signed a statement in support of a carbon tax, for instance, it’s nowhere to be found in Biden’s climate agenda. The administration has decided instead to deal with climate change almost exclusively through carrots (reward consumers and businesses for generating or consuming renewables) rather than sticks (make it more painful to produce or consume fossil fuels). This is more or less the framework for Biden’s marquee climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act.

The country has made progress in recent years in ramping up development of renewables. But it’s hard to attribute those increases to Democrats having force-fed clean energy to an unwilling public. Note that deep-red Texas, for instance, generates more electricity from wind and utility-scale solar than any other state. Meanwhile, the United States overall is still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels, with renewables representing a much smaller share of electricity production than is the case in most of our peer countries.

That’s our record, love it or hate it. Republicans have chosen to ignore it altogether, while berating Democrats for alleged curbs on fossil fuels that never happened.

Which means Democrats have landed in the worst possible position: They’ve been too cowardly to adopt the kinds of measures that would most effectively mitigate climate change, but they’re getting treated as if they did those unpopular things anyway.

As I’ve noted before, the transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable, regardless of what politicians do. Technological advances have made wind and solar increasingly cost-competitive against coal and natural gas. The only question now is whether political leaders speed this transition up or slow it down. If Democrats are going to take the political hit no matter what, they might as well do a little more to help.