Biden’s Environmental Tent Cannot Stand – The American Spectator

On Aug 16, 2023

With a stroke of the presidential pen, President Joe Biden has sabotaged domestic uranium mining and put his own energy agenda in jeopardy. Biden’s August 8 use of the Antiquities Act to declare almost a million acres of land in northern Arizona out of bounds for energy development blocks the ambitions of energy firms and nuclear advocates alike, who hitherto saw the territory as the country’s best hope for high-grade uranium. It is a curious decision for a man who alleges he is all-in on grid decarbonization. Uranium is the primary fuel for nuclear power generation, the only scalable, dispatchable, widely applicable form of carbon-free electricity known today. That the decision will exacerbate dependence on Russian uranium makes it yet more suspect.

The move is the latest evidence that the Biden environmental agenda is collapsing in on itself. The president is simultaneously tightening the vise on natural gas and coal power plants, challenging the dispatchable capacity of the nation’s power system, and driving the auto industry towards electrification, which ratchets up power demand. And yet he is going out of his way to stop development of the minerals — not only uranium, but also copper, nickel, and others — that this shift would require. (READ MORE: Biden Tanks U.S. Energy Economy)

The Biden electricity plan, unveiled this spring, is to suppress natural gas and coal — the generation sources that today provide 60 percent of U.S. power — through mechanisms like uneconomical carbon capture requirements. The proposed rule guarantees a mass retirement of well-functioning power plants. Remarkably, as Politico reported in May, the White House pushed the Environmental Protection Agency to stretch its new rule beyond what EPA itself has recommended. The EPA estimates that the plan will result in a 75 percent reduction in coal plant power generation in the U.S. and a nearly 20 percent reduction in natural gas generation. With the constraints around new transmissions infrastructure for renewables and the Biden administration’s refusal to commit to nuclear, what will make up the generation difference is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, another new EPA rule sets unprecedentedly strict limits on automakers’ fleetwide average for tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. The rule establishes that by 2032 an automaker’s sales-weighted carbon dioxide grams-per-mile figure must decrease 56 percent from the 2026 limit to just 82 grams per mile. To comply with the new limit, EPA estimates that 67 percent of the new passenger cars and trucks that Americans buy in 2032 will have to be electric. In 2022, just 6 percent were. A switch from gasoline and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles of this magnitude will not only cost a fortune, but it promises to strain the country’s already compromised power system. Analysis from Princeton University’s Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit indicates that the broader electrification push is expected to add 38 percent to U.S. power demand by 2035 — and that’s without the new Biden administration EV thrust. Another analysis suggests that a fully electric auto future would cause power demand to rise by 50 percent.

Achieving deep grid decarbonization amid rapid electrification of the auto sector would require a centralized, unified, and unrelenting commitment to its objectives. Some polities might have the stomach for that. Ours does not. The Biden administration and its progressive fellow travelers have instead enshrined something to which they refer with such benign-sounding terms as “community input” and “traditional ecological knowledge.” A better term is vetocracy — a political economy in which any interest group has a mandate to put the brakes on virtually any endeavor it does not like. While the climate left bemoans vetocracy’s impact when it stalls pet projects of its own, like offshore wind, if the party is one that it considers within its coalition, it will defer to it despite the energy stagnation it begets.

The decision to rule out uranium mining in northern Arizona is one such example. Consistent with the White House’s 2022 commitment to consider and apply “Indigenous Knowledge” and “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” to its decision-making, the president made his Antiquities Act National Monument designation on the grounds that “[f]rom time immemorial more than a dozen Tribal nations have lived, gathered, prayed on these lands.”

Joe Biden’s three-pole environmental tent — grid decarbonization, auto electrification, and community input — cannot stand. While none of the poles on its own would necessarily render his environmental goals impossible, they work at cross-purposes to one another and will tug against each other until the whole structure collapses, suffocating our economy as it falls in on itself.