DEMOCRAT JOE BIDEN PLANS TO CANCEL ALL OIL AND GAS LEASES IN ALASKA ANWR

Do you wonder why gas prices have shot up since Joe Biden and his team of environmentalist extremists took the House, Senate and White House? Well, it turns out that if you raise taxes on energy producers and regulate their businesses, the supply of energy goes down. When supply decreases, and demand stays the same, prices go up. That’s the law of supply and demand.

The Federalist reports:

The Biden White House plans to cancel all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge until a further review of their environmental impacts are assessed, according to the New York Times Tuesday.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the paper reported citing two insiders familiar with the administration’s plans, will publish an order to formally rescind existing leases months after the new president mounted a White House crusade against fossil fuels on day one with moratoriums on new drilling in the Arctic and other federal lands.

Marcella Burke, an attorney who specializes in energy policy and is an alum of the Trump Interior Department told The Times the move to halt drilling in the more than 19 million-acre refuge was far from unexpected.

“Since the Carter administration, whether ANWR can be leased is determined by which party is in the White House,” Burke told the paper. “Developers in ANWR assume there will be a policy shift between Democrat and Republican administrations. But it’s not permanent, assuming there will someday be another party in the White House.”

The Biden administration’s animosity towards fossil fuels, featuring Haaland at the top, a climate activist-turned two-term congresswoman described as “Green New Deal Champion,” has promised to make survival harder for the industry with new restrictions which could last beyond a four or eight-year term.

A new environmental analysis may impose heavy restraints on development in the Alaskan region and possibly halt new leases altogether for the remainder of the administration.

President Donald Trump opened the Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain, a nearly 1.6 million-acre stretch on Alaska’s north coast for oil and gas development in 2017 in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

During the Trump administration, you’ll recall that Trump implemented an “all of the above” solution to energy production. We had a boom in the zero-emission fracking industry, leading to extremely cheap prices on natural gas. Electricity prices went down. But now that Biden is back in, those prices are going right back up.

And this isn’t a surprise. It happens in every country that elects environmentalist extremists.

Let’s start with California. California has long been at the forefront of converting their energy production to “green” sources.

Here’s an article from Forbes that talks about their results:

California’s big bet on renewables, and shunning of natural gas and nuclear, is directly responsible for the state’s blackouts and high electricity prices.

“We will be forced today to ask utilities to cut off power to millions today, and tomorrow, and beyond,” said Stephen Berberich, the President and CEO of California’s Independent System Operator, CAISO, on a Monday morning conference call. “Demand will greatly exceed supply.”

The immediate cause of California’s blackouts is a mismatch between electricity supply and demand.

[…]The underlying reason blackouts are occurring is because California lacks reliable, in-state supply. And the reason for that is California has been closing both natural gas and nuclear power plants.

[…]Despite these capacity shortfalls, the state is moving ahead with plans to remove 2,200-MW of reliable electricity from the grid.  That’s the amount of power produced by Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which will be closed in stages in 2024 and 2025.

Well, how about Germany? They closed down their nuclear power plants in favor of wind and solar. It didn’t work.

Daily Caller explains:

Germany’s power grid almost collapsed in January due to poor performance from wind turbines and solar panels, according to data from a major trade union.

Wind and solar power plants under-performed in January, 2017, because of cloudy weather with little or no wind, setting the stage for massive blackouts.

[…]Green energy approaches failed to meet Germany’s stated energy goals, even after spending over $1.1 trillion. The country’s “Energiewende” plan to boost wind and solar production to fight global warming hasn’t significantly reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and may have actually caused them to go up.

[…]Due to the inherent unreliable performance of wind power and political opposition to nuclear power plants, Germany has been forced to return to coal to generate electricity. Coal now provides 44 percent of  Germany’s power,  This shift caused Germany’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to actually rise by 28 million tons each year following the policy shift.

All of Germany’s subsidies and support for green energy have sharply increased power prices, with the average German paying 39 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The average American only spends 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour by comparison.

Well, third try is the charm. How about Canada? They’ve gone Green New Deal for more than a decade. How is that working for them?

The National Post reported this in 2016:

Back in 2010, deep green environmentalist Rick Smith, then head of Environmental Defence Canada, hailed Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act regime as a cost-free operation that would catapult the province into the big leagues of renewable energy. Through fat subsidies and high prices offered to wind, solar and other renewable industry players, jobs and growth would boom and Ontario would be free of its dirty coal plants. It was the End of Coal, the government said. The birth of a renewable miracle.

Now, Canadians are paying more:

The doubling of electricity prices since 2005 is big politically, but it is just the top-line item on a long list of problems, misconceptions and outright fabrications that lurk within the Liberal government’s decade-long pursuit of radical greenism.

Because they didn’t listened to engineers… they listened to their hearts:

Ontario’s Society of Professional Engineers has issued more than half a dozen critical reports on the Liberals’ tendency to let green talk and politics override sound policy. Instead of following the expert advice of engineers and people who understand the intricacies of electricity production and distribution, the government took to issuing directives right out the Premier’s office.

We have to do what works to reduce electricity prices for the poor. What works is more natural gas (fracking) and more nuclear power.