Biden finally glimpses the importance of oil

Environmentalists are aghast. They shouldn’t be.

President Biden’s decision to approve a big oil-drilling project in Alaska feels like betrayal to climate warriors, given Biden’s campaign promise to “end fossil fuel” and pivot to a green-energy economy. But that campaign promise was never realistic. Biden is now learning the lessons of the 2022 energy crisis and acknowledging that the green energy transition is simply going to take a long time.

The Biden administration on March 13 approved ConocoPhillips’s Willow drilling project, which could eventually produce 180,000 barrels of oil per day during 30 years of operation. To appease his climate critics, Biden is limiting the amount of drilling on the site to the minimum amount that is economically viable, while also imposing new limits on drilling in other areas of Alaska.

It doesn’t seem like a compromise to climate activists, who call the Willow project a “carbon bomb.” But Biden’s softening stance toward fossil-fuel production is pragmatic and necessary. The green-energy transition is not an either/or proposition, as some environmentalists insist. It’s a both/and situation in which the United States needs assured access to the hydrocarbons we rely on today while also aggressively developing renewable sources of energy that will gradually replace them.

Developments in 2022 made crystal clear the importance of oil and natural gas for the foreseeable future. Fossil-fuel supplies were tight before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with prices for gasoline and other types of fuel rising as a result. Russia’s invasion created a genuine energy crisis. Russia’s hydrocarbon supplies came into question as Ukraine’s allies imposed punishing sanctions on Russia, and that threatened economies everywhere, given that Russia was and still is a top exporter of oil and natural gas.

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