The Focus on ‘Green’ Energy Has Left the West Increasingly Dependent on Russian Energy

 

...It’s clear that the Biden administration is infested with devotees of green energy who are hostile to the fossil fuels we urgently need right now. So too is the European Union, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, has just called for the continent to “massively invest in renewables,” a dubious short-term course given the limitations of wind and solar technology.

Just this month, Biden appointees at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission erected regulatory barriers that essentially make it impossible for the United States to ever build another LNG export terminal. Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia called the move “reckless.”

Will President Biden and our European allies now reverse course? It’s unlikely, given how deeply radical green ideas have infected the West. And part of the reason for that is that Russia has spent decades on “disinformation” campaigns undermining Western fossil-fuel production. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, has been a leading supporter of using woke capitalism as a tool to undermine the West.

The media have focused on Russia’s attempts to subvert our elections. But H. R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s national-security adviser from 2017 to 2018, told the BBC in December 2017 that Russia has “a sophisticated campaign of subversion” to “polarize communities and pit them against each other” and that “one of the most important things is to pull the curtain back on this activity, and to expose it.”

Some of that activity has had the aim of making the West increasingly dependent on Russian energy. In 2021, the United States imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than from any other country. Russia accounted for 21 percent of all U.S. gasoline imports...MORE