By Victor Davis Hanson |Townhall.com
Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in
the suburbs of Ukraine.
In response, the Biden Administration's climate-change
envoy, multimillionaire and private-jet-owning John Kerry, laments that Russian
President Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner in reducing global
warming.
"You're going to lose people's focus," Kerry
frets. "You're going to lose big-country attention because they will be
diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact."
"Impact"?
Did the global moralist Kerry mean by
"impact" the over 650 Russian missiles that impacted Ukrainian
buildings and tore apart children?
Are Russian soldiers losing their green
"focus"? When Putin threatens nuclear war is he merely
"diverted"? Would letting off a few nukes be "damaging" to
the human environment?
Climate-change moralists love humanity so
much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and
oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they
don't worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant
costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people's ability to travel or
keep warm.
The Biden Administration stopped all gas and oil
production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for
drilling. It is canceling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending
agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling.
It helped force the cancellation of the
EastMed pipeline that would have brought much-needed natural gas to southern
Europe. And it has in just a year managed to turn the greatest
oil and gas producer in the history of the world into a pathetic global
fossil-fuel beggar.
Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In
over-regulated blue states, it will likely hit $7.
The result is left-wing terror that the voters in the
coming midterm election might rightly blame Democrats for hamstringing the
American ability to travel, keep warm in winter and cool in summer, and buy
affordable food.
But how will the Biden Administration square the circle of
its own ideological war against oil and natural gas versus handing the
advantage to our oil- and gas-producing enemies, as Russia invades Ukraine?
Or put another way, when selfish theory hits deadly
reality, who loses? Answer: the American people.
President Joe Biden lifted U.S. sanctions on the
Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline designed to provide green Germany with
loathsome, but life-saving, natural gas.
But first Biden canceled the Keystone XL
pipeline in the United States. He has no problem with pipelines per se, just
American ones.
While Biden doesn't like the idea of Germany burning
carbon fuel, or Putin reaping enormous profits from Berlin's self-created
dependency, or Germans importing liquified natural gas from America, Biden also
does not like the idea of forcing German families to turn off their thermostats
in mid-winter when there is Russian-fed war not far from Germany's borders.
Here at home, Biden gets even crazier. As
our enemies around the world reap huge profits from record high oil and gas
prices, did Biden ask Alaska, North Dakota, or Texas to ramp up production?
In other words, did he ask Americans to save fellow
cash-strapped Americans from a self-created energy crisis, in the way he assured
the Germans that during war reality trumps theory?
Not at all.
Instead, Biden came up with the most lunatic idea
in recent diplomatic history of begging autocratic and hostile regimes the
world over to pump more oil to lower America's gas prices.
For years, America has sanctioned the oil-rich Venezuelan
dictatorship, a narco-terrorist state that wars on its own people and
its neighbors. Now Biden is begging strongman Venezuelan President Nicolas
Maduro to pump the supposedly dirty fuels America has in even greater abundance
but finds it too icky to produce.
Biden also has beseeched the once sanctioned, terrorist
Iranian government. He wants Tehran to help us out by upping the very oil
and gas production that America has tried to curtail for years. In return,
Iran is demanding a new "Iran Deal" that will soon ensure the now
petro-rich theocracy the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
On the eve of the Russian invasion, Biden begged Putin
to pump even more oil to supplement its current Russian imports to the United
States.
Did Putin see that surreal request as yet
another sign of American appeasement that might greenlight his upcoming planned
invasion? In Russian eyes, was it more proof of American weakness
and craziness after the humiliating flight from Afghanistan?
Biden has blasted the human rights record of Saudi
Arabia's royal family. Now he is begging the monarchy to pump more of its
despised carbon-spewing oil to make up for what his administration shut
down at home. Is that why the Saudi royals refused to take his call?
The moral of Biden's oil madness?
Elite ideology divorced from reality
impoverishes people and can get them killed.
