US Senator John Thune’s Weekly Column: Biden’s Energy Agenda: Unaffordable, Unreliable, and Unrealistic

Biden’s Energy Agenda: Unaffordable, Unreliable, and Unrealistic
By Sen. John Thune

Energy touches just about everything we do. More than just keeping the lights on, energy keeps America moving. It’s critical to bringing food and other goods to market. It supports our health care system and provides educational opportunities for students. And it powers critical technologies that keep businesses, farms, and ranches operating. Reliable and affordable energy is essential to modern life.

The Biden administration’s shortsighted energy agenda has put America’s energy security in jeopardy. For more than two years, the Biden administration has enacted policies to restrict energy development in the United States and raise the cost of producing conventional energy, which have caused uncertainty among America’s energy producers.

In September, the U.S. Department of the Interior took two significant actions that discourage producing conventional energy here in the United States. At the beginning of September, the department cancelled seven oil and gas leases in a small portion of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These leases were required by law, they were supported by Alaskans, and the land has the potential to produce a significant amount of homegrown energy. Yet the Biden administration chose to follow its radical environmental agenda rather than safeguard our energy security. A few weeks later, the department announced it would hold the fewest offshore oil and gas leases sales ever – just three sales over five years. These decisions are just the latest instances of the president restricting conventional energy development on federal lands and waters for the sake of appeasing the far-left of his political base.

The president’s anti-conventional energy policies have consequences. Utility bills for electricity and natural gas, as well as prices for gasoline and diesel, have risen significantly during the Biden administration. In February, one of the nation’s largest grid operators warned that legacy power plants are being forced to retire faster than renewables can be brought on line. And just recently, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation identified “energy policy” as a risk to grid reliability. The president’s energy policies are liable to drive prices up further, lead to greater instability on our electric grid, and increase reliance on foreign energy.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress promise to boost renewable energy by leveraging billions in Green New Deal-type subsidies. I’ve long been a supporter of renewable energy, and I am proud that South Dakota is both a top producer of ethanol and that our state generates most of its electricity from renewable resources. But the fact of the matter is that energy technology has not advanced to the point where we can rely solely or even mostly on renewable energy for the entire country. We’re going to need conventional energy for some time, and it’s better that we produce it in the United States than buy it from other countries, many of which do not share our interests or values.

The president has occasionally paid lip service to our continuing need for conventional energy, but his actions stand in stark contrast to his words. There’s no substitute for energy security, and that starts with producing energy here at home. I’ll continue to advocate for an all-of-the-above energy strategy that uses America’s abundant domestic resources in an environmentally responsible way.

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