Another Win in the War against the Weather

As though he didn’t look foolish enough-- what with his most recent facelift-- John Kerry has weighed in on the war in Ukraine.

To be fair, Kerry has considerable experience in standing down before Vladimir Putin. After all, he was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in 2014 when Putin took Crimea. About that invasion and take over, the pusillanimous and feckless Obama administration had very little to say.

Now, John Kerry is bemoaning the fact that the war in Ukraine is going to distract the world from the great war he is conducting-- against the weather. It is also fair to say that it might also be distracting our fearless military from its war against white supremacy. 

The word pathetic was invented for people like John Kerry.

Of course, looking at the situation more rationally, one Clarice Feldman has written a compelling piece wherein she explains how Green policy has facilitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Obviously, she is not just talking about the Green New Deal, many of whose policies have been implemented by hapless Joe Biden. She is also addressing the environmentalist forces in Western Europe.

In America, we had energy independence. We had overcome our reliance on Russian energy production. But then the Biden administration, lured by the Siren Song of the Squad, threw it away:

Whatever you think our obligations to defend Ukraine at the moment, you must concede that the green movement in Western Europe and the  United States made his actions possible. They also made any non-military reaction toothless and unpersuasive. It has been the equivalent of a poker player discarding a royal straight flush and then trying to bluff his opponents with the pair of deuces remaining in his hand. Only with dumb opponents is he likely to take the pot. And Russian President Putin is definitely not dumb.

And the reason he cannot actually do much more short of war, is because he and the leaders of western Europe—bamboozled by the prospect of "climate change"—have made themselves poorer and weaker by eviscerating conventional fuel production. While they without ample reason were discarding a very good hand, Russian president Putin was improving his by exploiting and selling to us and Europe his nations’ fossil fuels. 

So, we Americans went from net exporter to net importer of crude oil and petroleum. The facts speak loudly:

In 2020 the U.S. was a net exporter of petroleum. In 2021 we imported between 12 million and 26 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum from Russia every month. In November 2021, the most recent figures on record, the Energy Information Agency reports that the U.S. took 17.8 million barrels.

As it happens, Green Europe is seriously dependent on Russian energy. As we have often noted in these pages, the center-right German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, much lauded for God only knows what, managed to cave to Green pressure and shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants-- thus making her country even more dependent on Russia. (Of course, if you are opposed to carbon emissions, nuclear power is your friend. As it happens, Greens are staunchly opposed to nuclear; they prefer windmills and solar panels.)

Obviously, this limits Germany’s ability to participate in any sanctions regime.

And then there is Italy, also dependent on Russian energy:

Italy is already wavering. It’s already one of Russia’s biggest customers. It gets 90 percent of its gas from there. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Hungary or Belgium to jump into this, either. The British foreign minister imposed sanctions on five Russian banks and three wealthy Russians, but these are not new—they were previously targeted by the United States.

Feldman continues:

With all this hot air and too little energy resources to keep the bluff going, I think that Britain's Melanie Phillips is right when she asserts that the green dream has gone lethal: she quite correctly zeros in on how the green policies put so many government resources and legal proscriptions into reducing carbon emissions. that conventional fuel production was seriously reduced and funds shoveled into renewables “which are desperately unreliable as national sources of energy."

Obviously, America can no longer make up the shortfall. But it is not just America. British Tory leader Boris Johnson has joined the Green movement in Great Britain:

This has only made the West overly reliant on Russian gas supplies, threatening its security. She notes that in the United States Biden’s shutting down the Keystone XI pipeline and refusal to renew drilling licenses has tightened gas supplies and boosted energy costs. And that leaves out so much, including his war against fracking and the actions of states which marched along to this nonsense by shutting down gas and nuclear powered electrical generated power plants at the lunatic behest of the Green lobby. Britain, Phillips notes, phased out its coal-fired plants and banned fracking even though fracking alone could meet as much as 22 percent of its consumption for decades.

So, Feldman makes some very salient points. The West’s reliance on Russian energy gives Putin a free hand to do what he pleases with Ukraine. Another victory in the war against the weather.

And just as all these planning sessions apparently never discussed increasing domestic  energy production apparently they never touched on encouraging those countries we wished to ally with us in this about ramping up their energy production, the only pragmatic step to enable those countries so heavily dependent on imported Russian gas, to stand up to Russia.

And now it's too late.