Republicans seize on Ukraine to attack Biden's climate policies. But the facts are against them

Democrats are calling foul, however, saying the choice between shifting to renewables and fighting Putin is a false one.

March 01, 2022

Republicans are trying out a message that aims to link President Joe Biden's climate policy and rising gasoline prices to the war in Ukraine.

The problem? Their rhetoric largely defies reality.

Republicans including Montana Sen. Steve Daines, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance are making the claim that Biden's efforts to expand renewable energy has emboldened Putin to send troops, tanks and missiles into Ukraine.

And at least one conservative on social media has called the hostilities “the first war of the 'Green New Deal,'” a reference to a plan rolled out by progressives during the Trump administration calling for a speedy shift to carbon-free economy.

Democrats are calling foul, however, saying the choice between shifting to renewables and fighting Putin is a false one.

“This is the same tired argument they've been making the for the last several years where we live in this binary world where countries have to either buy our fossil fuels or Vladimir Putin’s," Democrat Rep. Jared Huffman of California said in an interview. "In a decarbonized world he is powerless, his country is poor and they’ll be looking for a new leader.”

The rhetorical pile-on comes as Republicans try to capitalize politically on an economic quandary that has bedeviled Biden for months: rising inflation, visible to Americans every time they fill up their cars, pick-ups and SUVs. The administration has insisted it is trying to limit how much economic damage the United States suffers from the West's financial penalties on Russia, but oil prices jumped above $100 a barrel this week for the first time in nearly eight years.

Even though U.S. oil and gas production has steadily increased since Biden took office — and is projected to rise this year — Republicans are blaming the rise in energy prices on the president’s efforts on climate change.

“For the Republicans, from a political perspective I would say the Democrats’ anti-fossil fuel agenda has taken a hit,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said, adding that anxieties about rising costs means the shift to clean energy does not feel “so gradual to the everyday American.”

Republicans are also echoing former President Donald Trump's false claims that he had made the U.S. energy independent — a contention that was based on the country becoming a net exporter of oil and gas in 2020 — and alleging that Biden has turned the nation back into a petroleum pauper.

In fact, U.S. exports of crude oil and petroleum products continued to outstrip imports during Biden's first year, according to figures from Energy Department's independent statistical arm, the Energy Information Administration. However, the export surplus narrowed from about 640,000 barrels a day in 2020 to 170,000 last year.

The larger reality: The U.S. has never been independent of foreign oil. Even when demand plummeted in the first year of the Covid pandemic, the U.S. still imported 7.9 million barrels per day, about double the daily use of Japan, the world's fourth-largest oil consumer. Those shipments of crude oil and refined products like diesel and gasoline mean the U.S. is subject to the prevailing winds of the global market — including the surges that have pushed U.S. crude oil and gasoline prices higher.

That hasn't stopped Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa from blaming Biden for destroying the oil and gas industry.

"AMERICA NEEDS ENERGY INDEPENDENCE we had energy independence b4 Biden energy policy killed it," Grassley tweeted on Saturday.

Republicans overall are struggling with factions within their own party on how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "genius" last week, while Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and more establishment Republicans have backed the Biden administration’s use of sanctions to aid Ukraine.

Now, lawmakers, including many Republicans, are starting to call for the Biden administration to impose sanctions on Russian energy exports — a move that would hurt European countries dependent on those shipments, and which would drive global prices even higher. Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves laid that problem at Biden's feet as well.

"The Biden administration made the bed. They have got to lay in it right now," he said. "They have two awful options in front of them. One is to ban Russian energy which is going to cause a huge spike in energy prices and the second option is they keep buying from Russia because they have absolutely tied Americans’ hands together because they have blocked access to American energy."

Republicans' objections may be more solidly grounded in Biden’s rhetoric about shifting away from fossil fuels than about the results of Democrats' policies. The biggest element of Biden's climate agenda, the Build Back Better bill, has been left for dead in the Senate. Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked 6.2 percent last year, the climate research firm Rhodium Group noted, a surge that reflects how little the infrastructure underpinning the nation's economy has moved away from carbon.

And even though the Biden administration has paused new oil and gas lease sales on federal land, the Interior Department processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden's first year in office than the Trump administration did in its final year. The U.S. became the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas this year, and domestic oil production is forecast to reach about 12 million barrels a day, putting it close to where it was before the Covid-era collapse in fuel demand in 2020.

Still, Republicans are leaning on the European turmoil to swipe at Democrats’ green designs. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday cited the European conflict as a reason the state is leading a challenge to an Environmental Protection Agency proposal from December to strengthen vehicle emission standards, which would benefit electric cars and trucks.

“At a time when American gas prices are skyrocketing at the pump, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict shows again the absolute need for energy independence, Biden chooses to go to war against fossil fuels,” Paxton said in the press release announcing the lawsuit.

The day after Russia started firing missiles into Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, Daines tried to tie the Kremlin's hostilities to Biden’s January 2021 decision to cancel the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline from Canada.

“What’s happening in Russia and Europe is a stark reminder of the need to support American energy development, not hinder it,” Daines said in a news release. “Energy security is national security, and a global energy dominant America is a safer world. Biden must restart the Keystone XL pipeline now.”

A spokesperson for Daines said in an email that the senator supports an all-of-the-above energy portfolio "that includes oil, gas, nuclear, hydro and coal.”

But the 1,200-mile Alberta-to-Texas pipeline wouldn't be transporting oil now even if Biden had allowed the project to proceed — construction of final leg had only just started in the United States when Trump left office. And it hasn't stopped shipments from Canada, which have climbed by nearly 70 percent since the pipeline was first proposed in 2008.

Many energy experts roll their eyes at the notion that shifting toward green energy was putting countries at the mercy of producers like Russia. In fact, dependence on oil and gas is what enables countries like Russia to weaponize their stranglehold on the fuel supply, said Amy Myers Jaffe, managing director of the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.

“I don’t think this is because the Germans are putting in wind,” she said.

In addition, Jaffe said, the GOP arguments ignore one crucial detail: “The bottom line is we haven't really begun the energy transition,” she said.

In the long term, moving away from fossil fuels toward greener sources would help check Russian aggression, said Yuriy Vitrenko, the head of Ukraine’s national natural gas company Naftogaz, in an email to POLITICO.

“The move to renewables was and is the right thing to do, but it is intertwined with geopolitics,” Vitrenko said. “The success of both the climate change fight and containing Russia depends on how the world manages the simultaneous transition from dependence on both Russia and fossil fuels."

Others noted that Putin's commanding role in supplying Europe's energy needs may have emboldened him to invade Ukraine, thinking that Western countries would be afraid to come to its aid. Instead, the United States and its European allies are succeeding in using sanctions to put Putin’s economy in major pain, not the other way around.

Putin “certainly may well have observed that the energy markets were very tight — oil markets really tight, gas markets really tight, coal really tight — and thinking that that would give him the real high cards in terms of Europe's dependence,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chair of market consulting firm IHS Markit. “But it turned out that that was a miscalculation.”

 


By:  Ben Lefebvre, Zack Colman
Source: Politico Pro