Energy and Pres. Biden's Infrastructure Plan

Before the presidency of Barack Obama the general view of energy in America was that there should be free market competition and that the different energy interests would help fund political campaigns to get the edge on their competitors. That changed during the Obama administration when an "all of the above" energy policy took hold.

Pres. Obama recognized that we needed a robust competitive energy market because energy costs are so fundamental to our economy. Prices for various fuels drive or slow economic growth.

Many Republicans liked this renewed interest in competition, particularly the natural gas producers and nuclear energy enthusiasts.

-- from an article entitled "America's Energy Policy Should be 'All of the Above' not 'Everything But'" by Ron Estes & Tracey Mann, RealClearEnergy.org, March 8th 2021

 

Their interest may have been less in an "all of the above" view and more in having more freedom to develop their own energy favorites, but they supported the policy.

A 40-year ban on US oil exports was lifted and sales took off.

 

 

Now U.S. oil producers could export oil (apparently they couldn't use it in America to serve our needs because their refineries were built for Middle-Eastern oil).

While oil producers were complaining they were selling more oil during a Democratic presidency than ever before!

The need to enable more natural gas sales led to the idea of competing with Russia and the Middle-East for sales to Europe

 

 

 

All the while the energy producers and Republicans complain about the Democrats and Green Renewable Energy.

What are our energy sources and how much does each contribute?

 

 

From Wikipedia

 

Petroleum and Natural gas have the largest shares with "Green Renewable" energy sources quite far behind. Coal has become too expensive relative to wind and solar power sources, so we know these Renewables will gradually expand their share while coal decreases. The question is how fast this happens.

This is where we have to look at the subsidies which have been given by the federal government over the years and those numbers are huge. Consider that a major reason we keep a large nuclear naval fleet is to protect oil shipments and shipping lanes around the world and the cost of supporting oil is huge. Even natural gas doesn't get that kind of support.

It's time to make the shift in subsidies away from oil (in particular) to Green Renewables. It's really that simple. We must shift away from Middle-Eastern oil sources and the politics of that region and away from oil industry subsidies to "home-grown" Green Renewable energy supplies. We can do it now or later and later will always be more expensive and destructive.

Let's start by increasing subsidies to Green Renewables, so we will continue to have all the supplies of the various energy sources we need while we make this large and inevitable shift away from coal. Let's have a truly "All of the Above" energy policy, not "But for Green Renewables".