How Ukraine is being used to attack fossil fuels

Never let a crisis go to waste, as the age-old Beltway wisdom goes, but one might think that the Ukraine crisis, in which thousands of innocents are dying and losing their homes, millions have been driven into refugee camps, and in which Russian military savagery is the order of the day, might give the usual Beltway suspects pause.

Get real. Utter shamelessness is a feature rather than a bug in these politicized times, and in no context is such cynicism more blatant than with respect to the use of the ongoing Ukraine tragedy to attack the fossil-fuel industry and to promote unconventional energy hugely expensive, utterly unreliable, and environmentally destructive.

This opportunism has taken two forms. The first is the laughable attempt to blame high gasoline prices on anyone, everyone other than the Biden administration. High gasoline prices represent “Putin’s price hike,” a stance not consistent with the reality that gasoline prices have been rising since December 2020. The oil companies are engaged in “price gouging” and “profiteering,” an argument not consistent with the failure of overseas gasoline producers to drive prices down by exporting ever-more gasoline to the U.S. market, thus capturing those profits for themselves.

The fossil producers ostensibly are allowing 9,000 approved leases on federal land to go unused, an argument that ignores several inconvenient facts. Leases are not the same as permits. Litigation by environmental groups has tied up many approved leases in endless delay, as have environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act. Individual leases are not actually useable for horizontal drilling operations until a continuous leasehold is acquired and the permits granted, a general roadblock not eased by the Biden administration de facto ban on new leases. As noted by the Western Energy Alliance: Because there are 37,496 leases in effect, the “9,000 unused leases” claim implies a 75 percent utilization rate, an historic high. – READ MORE