The View from Right Field

Why Should Anybody Trust Us? The Joe Biden Edition – #2

I wrote posts with this title (or at least this idea) during the Obama administration (here and here) and the Trump administration (here).  (Since this blog only started in April 2006, I might not have written one about the George W. Bush administration.) 

I also wrote one about Joe Biden’s abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan.¹  We had allies there with us, but President Biden decided to leave without consulting them.  He wanted to leave (he had wanted to leave since Obama’s first term), and he wasn’t going to let facts or friends, or anything else, get in the way of what he wanted to do.

And so, we have Friday’s decision to halt the permitting of terminals for exporting liquified natural gas.  President Biden claimed it was about the climate crisis, but it was really about the political crisis.  He wants to get reelected.  After 32 years, he finally got to be President and he doesn’t want to give it up – and he doesn’t much care what he has to do to keep it.

Shale, f/k/a Fracking, Does It Again

According to today’s The Wall Street Journal:

“A surprise surge in American oil and gas production and exports is helping to keep the world stocked, blunting the impact of widening conflict in the Middle East that has crimped key shipping lanes. 

When Iranian-backed Houthi militants began launching missiles and drones at ships crossing the Red Sea near Yemen in October, many feared disruption to the vital shipping lane would drive up energy prices. But oil and gas prices this past month have sunk about 5% and 23%, respectively. 

COP-28 and the Big Question: Who Is Going to Pay for It?

With COP-28 going on in Dubai¹, I thought Greg Ip’s column in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal was very appropriate.  The headline in the print edition of the Journal asked the key question: “Who will pay for Green Transition?”

The answer is actually quite simple: If the Green Transition is going to happen, we are all going to have to pay for it, either through higher prices for energy, higher taxes to pay for all the subsidies the Biden administration is giving out, or higher deficits for those subsidies, which our grandchildren will eventually have to pay for.  Or maybe all three.

We Need to Adapt to Climate Change – Now.

If the extreme weather that is happening around the world is a result of climate change, i.e., because we are putting so much carbon into the atmosphere, three things are true: (i) we need to reduce the amount the carbon we put into the atmosphere; (ii) number (i) is not going to happen for quite a while; and (iii) therefore, we need to figure out how to adapt to and deal with the extreme weather we are having because it is going to be around for quite a while.

Items (ii) and (iii) are not something people want to hear.  Their response is going to be: We have to do something now! That may what they want, but it is not what is going to happen.  Even if the United States, Europe, and other developed nations meet their announced plains, they are not going to reach “Net Zero” carbon until 2040 (or maybe 2050) at the earliest, which means they are going to be putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere until at least 2040.  If too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the problem today, then even based on what the developed countries are promising to do, the problem is going to be with us for a long time.

Trump Being Bad Doesn’t Make Biden Good

As with my last post, this is something I have said before that needs to be said again: Just because Donald Trump was not a good president (how’s that for understatement) and would be even worse in a second term (see, inter alia, here and here), that does not mean Joe Biden is doing a good job.  He’s not.  In President Biden’s case, I am not talking about his character (though some have done so).  I am talking about his policies.  Here is a short list of some of them (there are more):

• While supply chain disruptions from Vladimir Putin’s renewed invasion of Ukraine may have added to inflation, our inflation started long before Putin’s invasion.  It was a result of the huge Covid stimulus package in 2021 that we did not need.  The stimulus package in 2020 was necessary.  The one in 2021 was not.  All that money had a big role in the inflation that followed.  Some may say that people needed the money, but people always want free money from the government.

“Getting mad at oil majors will not solve climate crisis”

This is a letter to the editor published in the Financial Times on today under the heading quoted above: 

“The title of your Big Read on energy ‘Big Oil: still profits before planet’ (February 11) was misleading.¹  Regardless of what environmentalists and elites may think, it is not the job of oil companies to solve climate change.

Climate change requires more than world leaders agreeing to a set of lofty ideals in Paris and then having businesses do all of the work for them.  It requires leaders to actually convince people that governments need to pass laws and adopt regulations to cut emissions.  Climate change isn’t going to be solved by getting mad at oil companies.  It’s going to be solved by adopting a carbon tax that will put the real cost of carbon emissions in the price of products.  Or establishing an emissions trading system, with a decreasing cap on total annual emissions, that guarantees emissions will be cut.

Are Investors Being “Un-American” for Not Drilling More?

An article in the Financial Times last Monday quoted Anne Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy, as saying:

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and to increase dividends when profits are at all-time highs is outrageous.  It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.

You want to pay dividends, pay dividends.  You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders.  You want to get bonuses, do that, too.  You could do all that and still invest more.  We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment. …

Thoughts of One and a Half Dozen of the Other*

It’s getting hard to write longer posts these days, so here are some short thoughts that I wish I could develop further but haven’t been able to get to:

• Re Ukraine: Joe Biden is doing a pretty good job, certainly better than either of his predecessors (especially Barack Obama, who wouldn’t even sell antitank weapons to Ukraine after Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in 2014).  But President Biden could be doing better.  We need to sell/give the Ukrainians more weapons and more powerful weapons.  The best, and quickest, way to end the war is for Ukraine to win.  Let’s help them do it – now.

• Given all the weapons we are shipping to Ukraine, we need to replenish, and build up, our own inventories.  That means spending more money on defense – and committing to do it for an extended period of time.

Helping Europe Stand Up to Putin’s Blackmail – Is Helping Us, Too

Chris Giles wrote in the Financial Times last Wednesday on how Europe could withstand a Russian cutoff of natural gas deliveries this winter.¹  Basically, it requires product substitution (products requiring lots of natural gas in their production should be made elsewhere), more coal needs to be used for power in the short run, Germany needs to not shut down their three remaining nuclear power plants, etc.  Starting in January, ships that can liquify liquid natural gas (LNG) for Germany will go online. 

Which got me thinking: What are we doing to help out in this situation?  If LNG can help, what are we doing to increase our exports of LNG?  Obviously, we should have already been doing things like this, but it’s not too late to start now.  We just need to hurry.  We need to not get caught up in permitting delays and environmentalist objections.  This is a war.  We need to do what is necessary to win it.  It won’t take that long.  Maybe a year or two.  We can still meet our environmental goals.  But right now, we need to not let Vladimir Putin get away with blackmail and intimidation – and war.²
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¹ Chris Giles. “Europe can withstand a winter recession,” Financial Times, August 10, 2022.  (Behind the FT paywall.)
² In any case, anybody who thinks Vladimir Putin cares about climate change is silly.

“I Need Ammunition, Not a Ride.” And Other Comments on America and Ukraine

If there is a contest for quote of the year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already won it with his response to America’s offer to fly him out of the country (or maybe to Lviv, in far western Ukraine, I’m not sure) after the Russian invasion started.  Maybe we thought he would want to leave, like Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani did when we abandoned Afghanistan.  But President Zelensky didn’t.  Which leads to my first comment:

1. Just like in Afghanistan, our intelligence in Ukraine was really bad.  In Afghanistan, we thought the government could last for months after we left.  Instead, it collapsed before we were even gone.  It was a total intelligence failure.

     It was much the same in Ukraine, except in the opposite direction.  While we got it right that Russia was going to invade, we were totally wrong about how well the Russian army would do and we were totally wrong about how well the Ukrainian army would defend its country.  We saw the Russian army as experienced and well-equipped, and we thought they would roll over the Ukrainians.  We saw the Ukrainian army as weak and unprepared, and we thought they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the Russians.  Both of these were wrong, and that was important because those intelligence failures may have affected our policy choices.