Here’s a good trick: produce every last inch of your own country, open the taps and become the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Then, when other countries start to try to develop their own resources, tell them they mustn’t, for the good of the planet. In other words, make them all dependent on you. That is pretty well what John Kerry, the outgoing special envoy on climate change, suggested on the BBC’s Today program this morning.
The US is shamelessly using climate change to promote its own industries
“We do need gas to keep our economies moving but we don’t need to open a whole raft of new exploration,” he said, adding that President Joe Biden had made a “courageous step” not to approve a recent gas project. Asked whether this meant that Britain shouldn’t develop new oil and gas fields — as the current government wants to do — he blathered on:
“According to the International Energy Agency, they have said we do not need new field exploration and development. What we need is to deploy more renewables.”
Just the one problem: Kerry is saying this from a position of US dominance in the West’s current energy market. Since 2008, when US oil and gas production reached a forty-year low, the country has more than doubled output — largely as a result of a huge expansion in exploitation of shale and oil reserves. This happened steadily under Obama, Trump and now continues Biden. In 2017, the US overtook Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil and gas producer. The Ukraine crisis has further cemented its position, with shiploads of liquefied natural gas replacing Russian gas in European markets.
What a time, then, to start trying to persuade European countries not to develop any more of their own reserves. Kerry must know that European environmentalists will project his words — ignoring the very inconvenient fact that the US benefits from every drop of oil and puff of gas which Europe fails to develop. But it is not out of character with the Biden administration: the president’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Kerry also talked up during the interview, is a pretty blatant piece of protectionism dressed up as an environmental measure. The IRA offers numerous bungs to US consumers to persuade them to buy green stuff — but only green stuff, that is, that happens to be made in the US.
While Europe continues to sacrifice its industry and compromise its citizen’s lifestyles in order to pursue net zero targets, the US is pretty shamelessly using climate change as a means of promoting its own industries — oil and gas ones included. It is small wonder that the gulf between growth rates in Europe and the US is widening by the day.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
