Biden's energy regulators think they are the smartest people in the room

As part of its costly efforts to try to force a faltering energy transition through heavy regulation and debt-financed subsidies, the Biden administration has continued to ramp up its war on natural gas on several fronts.

This 2024 offensive began in January, when invoked the White House an ill-reasoned “pause” in approving permits for new LNG export facilities in a clear effort to impede the growth of the domestic industry and deny gas producers access to international markets. Justifications offered by the move of the White House, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and other administration spokesmen are absurd on their face, without disguising the clear political motivations at play.

Speaking at CERAWeek conference in Houston in March, Granholm said, “I predict that as we sit here next year … this will be right in the rearview mirror.” Granholm added that the pause is “like other studies we've done in the past.”

While that last part is true, conducting environmental impact studies is a regular part of the federal government's business, one would be hard-pressed to identify any precedent in which the government halted progress in an entire sector of thousands of millions -projects in dollars for a year to carry out one.

The next move in Biden's assault on natural gas came on April 23, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published its new rule related to the lease of fluid minerals on federal lands under its management. BLM lands include large swathes of oil and gas producing states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah.

The new rule greatly restricts producers' ability to lease federal land and dramatically increases the costs of doing business with large increases in royalty rates, permit fees and bonding requirements.

Two days later, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency ended its regulations on emissions from power plants. In a few days, dozens of state attorneys general had submit claims in federal court challenging the new regulation, using the same legal arguments that caused the courts to strike down a similar regulation issued during the Obama administration.

The rule is clearly designed to force the shutdown of all remaining coal-fired power plants in the U.S. within a few years, despite the fact that they provided 16 percent of total domestic power generation in 2023, more than wind and combined solar The onerous provisions of the rule also constitute a clear effort to prevent the construction of new natural gas plants, as they are too expensive to finance, despite the fact that natural gas plants generated 43% of the country's electricity last year. as detailed Biden Energy Information Administration.

The administration's most recent move came this week, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made a final test around Congress's legislative authority, issuing FERC Order of 1920, a 1,363-page ruling that regulates the authorization of new electrical transmission lines. The order will streamline permitting processes, in part by reducing the authority of states and local governments, for new transmission projects.

But the problem is that it will only provide such rationalization for electricity movement projects generated by renewable energy. As such, it is a clear effort both to socialize the costs of regional transmission projects across the 50 states and to eliminate other forms of generation by using the permitting process to discriminate against them and usurping authorities that have been reserved for the state and local governments for many decades.

So the Biden administration, in the waning days of his first, and possibly only, term in office is trying to push all favored sources of energy generation out of the picture at a time when demands of energy are skyrocketing. So the question is: can renewables alone meet this need?

Current battery technology to back up these intermittent and unpredictable forms of generation does not allow for a happy outcome to this question. This is simply undeniable.

This type of central planning, using authoritarian command-and-control regulations, has not had a positive track record of success in the US in recent years. But like executives Enron 25 years ago, the Biden people obviously think they're the smartest guys in any room, so we're all tasked with believing that everything will work out this time.

The problem is that we all remember what happened to Enron.

David Blackmon is a Texas-based energy writer and consultant. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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