The West must end its ruthless war on energy

Maybe now The West will realize the stupidity of its energy war, which has left it heavily dependent on the Kremlin killer and other oil and gas scum.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing a huge energy-related headache for Europe as Germany moves to ration natural gas amid looming shortages, along with sky-high prices (especially for oil and gas at the pump) there and here.

But energy prices rose well before the war, thanks in large part to attempts by the West to abolish its own fossil fuel industry, despite the lack of viable alternatives. This is especially true in Europe, which has been moving away from gas and oil like crazy – for example by closing gas plants and discouraging investment. Germany even got away from nuclear energy.

Yet the West lacks sufficient substitutes to meet its energy needs. Also, as Europe has learned the hard way over the past year or so, renewable energies such as solar or wind power are unreliable both Sun and wind were scarce. The Ukraine war only made these points clear.

Germany, of course, has known for a long time that renewables will not make it, which is why it is trying to buy ever larger amounts of natural gas from Vladimir Putin with the help of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This has led to foolish reliance on him.

In 2018, President Donald Trump said in a UN speech that “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it doesn’t change course immediately,” and German ambassadors laughed.

In fact, Russia supplies 30% to 40% of Europe’s energy needs – which is why it was so hard for the European Union to cut off Russian oil and gas after the war.

As prices at US pumps soar, President Joe Biden is reduced to pleading for more oil from OPEC and goons like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and stunts like the raid on the country’s strategic oil reserve. as he did again on Thursday. God knows what dangerous concessions his team offers Tehran to restore the flawed 2015 nuclear deal in hopes of fresh oil supplies from Iran.

To help Europe, Biden announced an agreement to supply it with an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas this year. But LNG plants in America are already operating at full capacity, and that amount won’t even come close to replacing the 155 billion cubic meters that Russia is providing. And while America has a lot more gas, restrictions on drilling, fracking, gas pipelines, new LNG plants and the like stand in the way of greater production.

Hell, the European Union could produce more oil itself – if its western members lifted their stupid, unscientific fracking bans. (The same is true for US states with high energy costs like California and New York, a topic we’ll return to this week.)

It’s time the West acknowledged an inconvenient truth: we’re all going to need carbon-based fuels (and nuclear power) for the foreseeable future. If we refuse to exploit our own resources, we simply buy from and enablethe most heinous regimes in the world.