Recent US presidential elections are at least consistent. Two in a row have been fabricated pileups of oil and gas disinformation. The first, in 2020, was simple, political prevarication. Under the Biden-Harris playbook, it was just old-school double-crossing. Four years later, the 2024 Harris-Walz playbook is much the same, though with little effort any longer made to camouflage the flagrant disinformation. Claim, in a single interview with CNN, and in Tuesday’s debate with Trump, to be all in on fracking and you will win Pennsylvania. Followed by winning the general election. Wait two months until Day One. Then kill previous statements with more spin, more executive orders, and more subterfuge.
Such is politics and, after all, oil is politics.
Going back to Day One of the Biden-Harris administration, the following pro-fracking moves were instituted:
Canceling the Keystone Pipeline
Unlawfully placing a 60-day moratorium, and then outrightly canceling new oil and leasing on Federal lands
Directing the Interior to begin a thorough review of existing oil and gas drilling permits, with a sly look towards canceling them
Revoking Trump administration actions that had eased regulatory requirements
Rejoining the lopsided, US punitive Paris Climate Accord
Elevating climate change as an essential element of US Foreign Policy and National Security
And to think, 60 days before their leftward lurch, Biden-Harris were all in on fracking. Gee, with friends like these…
Being the owner of an Appalachian-based hydraulic fracking company, and a Rocky Mountain oil and gas production company, I was of course following campaign statements and candidate posturing. But in the aftermath, I wasn’t surprised by the imprudence. Biden had always been a flavor of the moment bureaucrat. That would continue. But it was also obvious by the company he kept who he would become as president. In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, I covered his envelopment of leftist energy duplicity in an article for Oilprice.com—
“So where does Joe Biden truthfully stand on fracking? That depends on who he’s talking to. In the old days they called it “waffling” and it was a disqualifier. Not so any longer. If there is any sort of pushback, the 2020 method is to simply…deny that you have multiple positions on the same subject. When no one pushes back, why not? They call Joe a fair-minded moderate, a congenial and thoughtful friend to both sides of an argument. I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. A moderate doesn’t choose a San Francisco prosecutor with an anti-fossil fuel record as a running mate. A moderate also wouldn’t choose socialist New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate task force.”
So that’s Biden-Harris. What about Harris-Walz? Due to a lack of transparency and a shapeshifting of policy, you can only assume more of the same—but worse. Harris will turn to her base, the progressive left made up of the interminable protest class. Unlike Biden, a career bureaucrat, Harris is a true believer. In fact, she’s on record—multiple times—telling us exactly how she feels, regardless of what she must say to win elections. Emboldened, the same duplicitous pro-fracking strategy of quietly killing oil and gas will continue, but with more zeal.
To wit, take a look at Harris’s 18-minute, August 29, 2024 CNN interview. In a brief exchange with congenial fan-girl Dana Bash, we got two positions on oil and gas, both being dishonest.
First Fiction
Bash: “Do you still want to ban fracking?”
Harris: “No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
She’s telling the truth, just as she did in Tuesday night’s debate with Trump. But she is telling the purposefully selective, literal truth. Harris won’t directly ban fracking because she won’t have to, not when there are more clandestine ways to kill it.
No doubt, though, Harris is not in favor of fracking. Harris is in favor of winning.
The closest she has ever gotten to greenlighting fracking was in her 2020 debate with Vice President Pence, the one referenced above, when she said:
“Joe Biden will not end fracking” and: “I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”
Of course, Harris is referring to Biden’s guileful stance. Not her own. But counting on a napping, unaware electorate—a recurring contrivance in the Harris-Walz campaign—she conveniently claims it as her own.
Continuing with the Harris-Walz CNN interview—
Second Fiction
“In fact, Dana — Dana, excuse me — I cast the tie-breaking vote that actually increased leases for fracking as vice president. So I’m very clear about where I stand.”
Such is the practice of an artful dodger. Make an outrageous statement, make it in front of a complaint correspondent, be it CNN or ABC News on Tuesday night, and let it become the unchallenged truth. But not so fast—
What Harris was referencing was her tie-breaking vote for passage of the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) of 2022. The IRA was not an oil and gas leasing mechanism as she eem to claim. That distinction belongs to the Mineral Investment Act of 1920 and the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Rather, the IRA requires federal leases to be offered to oil and gas development prior to wind. It does not mean “sold,” just offered. Therein lies the cheat. Lawsuits and ridiculously constructed studies (CO2, plant, bird, mammal, fish) will prevail and these lands will not be drillable, not at the cost required to litigate them.
The unvarnished truth is that Biden and Harris placed a moratorium on all federal oil and gas leasing on Day One. When the courts challenged them, Biden and Harris had spokesperson Jen Psaki further mislead the public by challenging the industry to use the 9,000 drilling permits already in hand. Had Psaki been honest, or at least knowledgeable, she, or a curious press, may have dug down and reported on the fact that Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) drilling permits are placeholders as much as they are allowances. Operators use them—per federal rules in a federally enacted system—to secure positions until some later date when permits are drilled, sold, or forfeited. None of it is free. In fact, what Harris really signed was a bill forcing a 33% increase on federal land royalties, plus a doubling and tripling of fees for oil and gas operators.
Another whopper and where was the obedient, accommodating press? When it’s the climate hustle, nowhere to be found.
Harris is building a record of mistruths, much like her running mate Walz, but on climate, you can take her at her word. She talks of putting another trillion dollars into “clean energy” over the coming decade. She means it too, but in government speak, one means five, maybe ten. Harris will push the transition—the big “T” Transition—regardless of what market forces might say, or scream. What will be glossed over, or simply not discussed, will be the usual culprit—the truth. As brutishly harsh as it may sound, there is no energy transition. Sacrosanct renewables, with all the associated good intentions, are additive only.
“This whole discussion of energy transition sometimes seems to lose contact with economic history and reality.”
-Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Vice Chairman of S&P Global
In the headrush of renewables, truth has suffered the most in the Biden-Harris-Walz hide the facts crowd. In their black is blue global crisis campaign, we’re pressed to accept their religious climate fervor, that they have this, that we’re in good hands. The truth is that the government can’t punch its way out of a wet paper bag, certainly so when it comes to building an industry, especially upstream, midstream and downstream energy production and distribution. Government is only good at getting in the way and that is what is occurring.
Within our evenly divided electorate, appetites are becoming less, not more, as a resistance looks to be forming. People are growing sick and tired of gas stove moratoriums, no new natural gas hookups in NY, EV mandates, ESG, and scolding from high-minded climate czar types. It’s an occurrence of opposites. A groundswell of opposition from consumers is forming. Ford just took a $1.3 billion loss on its EV unit due to general disregard. Fisker has failed alongside SunPower and over one hundred other green energy companies.
Along the same vein, C-suites are shedding their DEI departments and ESG mandates. Most people understand that climate change is a real thing, but are fed up with climate alarmism.
Distrust in our ruling class also continues to grow apace. The resistance comes from weary taxpayers questioning the Obama-Biden administration’s embrace of the Paris Agreement, the Climate Accord. Trump pulled the US out, but Biden-Harris put us back in. Likely Harris-Walz will eagerly and recklessly continue—with a penitent US, shamed by its riches, assuming the lion’s share of the Accord’s direct and indirect costs. The Paris Agreement gave the US mandates and directives, while the Chinese were given coal.
No argument is made that renewables shouldn’t exist, none of my oil field brethren say that, but the argument for leaving fossil fuels in the ground is getting to be a bigger lift, especially when admitting to the shortcomings of wind and solar. Strip mining, battery production and disposal, acid rain, the renewable waste stream, bird killing nondegradable blades, dead whales, and solar farms with their enormous land use are not winning over new converts. Smelting minerals and kill zones associated with the high ambient temperatures radiating from acres of Chinese panels isn’t helping much either. Neither are warnings from utilities about brownouts and blackouts from an already overburdened grid—one that continues to burn coal for baseload requirements.
There’s also the enormous cost that taxpayers will have to bear, one that will dent standards of living and arguably lead to the chronic impoverishment of an expanding class of poor, all at the hands of bad climate policy.
In truth, renewables and their accompanying waste stream are just another extraction industry favored by an administration trading one extraction industry for another. To quote Daniel Yergin again—
“I see this as a shift from Big Oil to Big Shovels.”
Yergin isn’t alone in his sentiment. Several governments, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have all expressed alarm at the level of mining required to meet coming green energy demands. Disposal of spent minerals is another topic, a dystopian one. Complications also not addressed are countries biased against heavy metals mining, especially in the US where the back-asswards Biden-Harris administration is promoting minerals while sanctimoniously making it more difficult to mine, if not killing it outright.
As renewables require more mining, look for more regulation, longer permitting times, more litigation, in the same manner that oil and gas development is litigated and derailed. And what will happen should the right suddenly deploy the argumentative methods of the left? The predictable accessories to the left, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, may not take up anti-renewable causes brought by a provoked right, but other courts might in an outcome of mutually assured destruction.
In this climate war on our own, the largest failure may be one of recognition. Carbon has been and remains the apex building block of modern society. It is everywhere because it is foundationally essential. And it is not going away. Progress and a warm, well-fed society depend on it. Owning oil and gas reserves is also a national treasure, a God-like gift of security, freedom, peace and solvency. Ask the oil and gas poor Chinese. No wonder their globetrotting spending spree, buying up roughly 70% of the mineral reserves required by renewables, then quietly, like a potential Harris-Walz administration, taking the case to consumers that renewable energy is the only good energy.
But the shortfalls of renewables… Globally, look to Sub Saharan Africa, where population growth continues and a need for more reliable energy is placing leaders of Uganda and Tanzania at odds with old hat colonialists like France and Belgium. A proposed oil pipeline from the Indian Ocean into the African heartland is not going over very well among the high-minded environmentalists in Brussels, where per capita income is 50 to 60 times greater than that in Uganda and Tanzania. Nevertheless, Members of the European Parliament scold and lecture the Ugandans claiming climate and environmental damage, and even, preposterously, human rights violations. The pushback from the Ugandans was immediate and telling, rightly accusing the MEPs of exhibiting “the highest level of neocolonialism and imperialism against the sovereignty of Uganda and Tanzania.” In other words, the affected, overly-weened elites up north were paid the highest honor. The Ugandans only wished to emulate them and their inconvenient past by building up their people in the same manner as the Europeans did. With oil.
Mandates and green saber-rattling aside, renewables are playing second and third fiddle to countries more concerned with the bleak prospect of starvation. Given that 80% of the world’s $100 trillion economy is already dependent upon oil and gas for its energy, rolling out costly and challenging renewables risks being a calamitous flop, one of colossal proportions. No reasonable argument can be made that oil and gas can be replaced by renewables, especially in the time frame claimed by the class of loud and misguided zealots. To these naysayers that blindly insist on saying never to oil and natural gas, consider that in the environmentally minded Biden-Harris administration, more oil was released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve than under any previous administration, an acknowledgement that the electorate doesn’t like the high gas prices that come from restrictive and poorly conceived energy policy. Consider too that headwinds are beginning to blow harder for renewables, increasingly so with many resource-rich countries adopting anti-mining postures.
Yet the Biden-Harris regime attempted to curtail oil and gas production anyway. They cancelled federal leasing activity, as my company has seen firsthand in Wyoming. Drillers had enough inventory to continue working, but in the grind-it-out, conveyor belt activity of horizontal development, leasing absolutely must carry on. They know that, but in their ideological zeal, they weren’t to be stopped.
In energy scholar Vaclav Smil’s book, “How the World Really Works,” oil’s omnipresence is acknowledged in what he defines as the four pillars of modern civilization—cement, steel, plastics, and fertilizer (ammonia). A commonality is that all are dependent on the same thing. Oil. How is it that renewables will allow this quick transition when in truth, all other energy transitions required many decades to accomplish? Previous transitions were also driven by economic forces and innovation, unlike our current attempt at a green transition that is driven by politics and taxpayer subsidies. Then there is the other inconvenient truth, that the carbon atom is not for burning alone. It is a base element, indispensable and deeply rooted in nearly all industries and products.
Even with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, grants, credits, and cash, the growth of renewables has been nothing like the concurrent growth in out-of-favor natural gas for power generation. The challenge too is that the pie is growing, as is the renewable slice, but not anywhere close to what is needed to meet climate goals amid a growing population.
—In 1960, the earth’s population was four billion inhabitants. It is now roughly eight billion and will reach 10 billion or more per UN projections.
According to S&P Global Platts Analytics, banning new fracking on federal lands would put more than 1.1 to 1.6 million b/d of US crude production at risk. In a 13 million b/d market, where fractional swings in production are immediately telegraphed to price, the consequences would be skyrocketing oil and gasoline prices, spiking inflation, economic malaise, and a headlong rush to embrace overseas oil from the warlords, dictators, and terrorists who want to kill us. It would also do nothing to protect the environment. In fact, the outcome would be wrongheadedly antithetical. Crudes derived from US shale are high gravity, low sulfur, and less energy-intensive to refine.
Their production is also strictly enforced by methane capture, water, environmental and species rules. Importing more crude and refined products from the usual suspects like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Canada and you are complicit in the generation of more pollution. Imported, high sulfur crudes require ships to move, and a good deal of shipping is powered by bunker fuel-burning diesel plants. This tar-like fuel is emissions heavy, occupying the dirty end of transportation. The clean end is pipelines, like the ones used in the US, those that haven’t been foolishly banned.
Yet Biden and Haris continue to punish domestic oil even as they’ve been forced, at their own hand, into a Faustian Bargain with caliphates and dictators determined to destroy the Western world, chiefly, the United States. Biden and Harris allowed more Iranian oil on the market. There is no doubt their administration enriched Iran and no doubt where that money went.
According to the Wall Street Journal—
Iran “exported nearly 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in October, sustaining its average for 2023. This is up 80% from the 775,000 barrels per day Iran averaged under the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy…” The Iranian surge in oil exports since President Biden took over has brought Iran an additional $32 billion to $35 billion… The calculations are tricky, but the cause of the Iranian windfall is clear: As part of Mr. Biden’s quiet diplomacy with Iran, the U.S. has curtailed sanctions enforcement... This transfer of funds to Iran is cumulatively more significant than the President’s recent $6 billion ransom payment in return for five hostages. And it keeps growing, even as the money fails to moderate Iranian behavior. Instead, it finances Iran’s aggression abroad via proxies such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the front groups in Iraq and Syria that shoot at American bases almost daily.”
Roughly 40,000 Palestinians and Israelis have died to date since the October 7, 2023 massacre. And still, we hear about existential climate threats from an administration that blindly turns away from the grim and inconvenient truths of its own actions.
If the threat of a continuing, and possibly a wider war in the Middle East isn’t convincing enough, consider the war in Ukraine coupled with green-enthralled Germany’s about-face on wind. With Russians marching, European climate fantasy has met harsh reality. Under threat of Russian aggression, Germany rushed back to coal, and LNG, and looks to be reconsidering its utopian reliance on mandated wind. Yet, such reliance had already come under scrutiny with the damnable lack of wind on the continent. Surely, as with all things, climate change must be to blame. Nonetheless, the German wind turbine rollout has stalled to a meaningless 1% year-over-year rate of growth.
Where is Churchill now, hollering into the wind about a menace no one else cared to see? Certainly, there’s no equivocation between Nazis and marching Russians and advocates for climate change, but there are no checks and balances either. No one is effectively challenging their pumped-up rhetoric, their doomsday cult. Groups like Earth Watch, the National Resources Defense Council (“NRDC”), WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club are not helping. Their militant posture on all things green has done very little, other than make energy more expensive. The burden of their misplaced efforts lands on the poor as they launch attack after attack on affordable energy in place of a source of energy that does not yet exist—in the quantity or quality needed to meet current and/or growing demand. It’s not even close. Yet the climate left espouses all sorts of poorly contrived thoughts like cutting our energy usage in half. The rich will find a way around that one. The poor won’t.
"Opening new areas to oil and gas development amounts to ignoring what science tells us is necessary to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change," an NRDC policy team said in a 2021, statement. "The agency should end new oil and gas leasing in federal waters and limit future onshore leasing to the greatest extent possible."
Again, there is nothing there, no magic source of energy to turn to, nothing but an inane desire to clean up a planet that is actually pretty clean (but yes, can always be cleaner), and accept, or just ignore, the riotous anarchy that would ensue should they catch a President Harris’ attention. And they will. They already have, regardless of her 2024 campaign stratagem.
Maybe a grand bargain is due. One in which there is nothing but the truth. Starting here, let’s all admit that no energy source is clean from start to finish. That is an indisputable fact. Accepting that, look to a balance between oil and green energy in a duopoly in which green energy makes sense—and in which its advocates finally and truthfully admit to their own shortcomings, their waste stream, and the on-off nature of wind and solar.
The proposed grand bargain should also shed additional truth on methane emissions. Of the greenhouse gases, methane is the most damaging, more so even than CO2—an atmospheric poison that natural gas has reduced. Yet oil accounts for only 8% of methane emissions per a 2022 study from the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Natural gas comes in at 6% and coal at 7%. Wetlands are at 33%. Agriculture is 24%, and landfills, biomass burning and other are 22%.
That makes oil and gas combined responsible for 14% of all methane released in the atmosphere. 14%. Maybe the draconian measures from the climate left, and their litigious practices might yield better results if they were to work with the extraction industry, rather than trying to bankrupt it and the American people. My oil and gas company continues to follow the best practices put into place by Wyoming’s Air Quality Division, a part of its Department of Environmental Quality. We capture and contain methane at the wellhead, atop tank farms and along pipelines. My industry is doing its part without the subterfuge or nuance of the left,
A more adroit energy policy would be one in which the government doesn’t pick winners and losers as we can expect in a Harris-Walz administration; one where taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill of intervention. Private capital and market outcomes should be the drivers in a for-profit policy that is weighted towards human-first considerations, one that balances cost and the environment, and that rewards thrift and innovation.
Forgo the hateful civics of hardened climate activists. Ignore their scorched earth, war-like dispositions, their simple-minded favor of a unicorn, human-second energy policy. Consider advances in battery production, and small-scale nuclear reactors. Embrace fracking and horizontal drilling and all the recent innovations, including the original premise, which was to turn a bit sideways and drill through thousands of feet of an oil and gas bearing formation—as opposed to a few dozen feet with vertical wells. Recently, a Haliburton friend told me he was moving a frack spread onto a 36-well pad. Twenty years ago, it was one well per pad. Ten years ago, there was some incremental density, but nothing like this. This is new. A 36-well pad means one road, one pipeline and one transmission line with 36 separate wells a mile and a half under the undisturbed surface. Haliburton’s frack fleet is also a recent innovation. It’s electric.
So many deserving issues deserve so much more. Things like childhood poverty and the everywhere availability of fentanyl aren’t being meaningfully addressed. Eighty thousand mostly young Americans are dying from fentanyl every year. But nothing is done. Instead, we have this overwhelming climate preoccupation. We hear nothing about human wreckage from our morally disinterested press, and nothing other than “treatment” and “root causes” from the Harris-Walz campaign on drugs entering the US. Should a position eventually develop there, take it with the same grain of salt taken when you heard Harris’ shifting position on fracking.
Under a Harris-Walz administration, obfuscation will rise alongside oil prices. The middle class will be further pinched. Inflation will rise. Air and water will not become any cleaner. And the poor—always the poor with Kamala Harris—will be pushed into a deeper level of poverty under her weighted hand.
But at least she’s for fracking…
“We are all born ignorant, but must work hard to remain stupid,”
-Ben Franklin
By Dan Doyle for Oilprice.com
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