Stephen Moore
Among the great mythologies of recent years, one stands out above the rest: that the world is in a “great energy transition.” Actually, the world is in a dramatic energy transition. But it is not the one the left wants it to be.
Despite the billions of taxpayer dollars thrown at wind and solar power, we still get less than 10% of our energy from green sources. The needle really has not moved at all over the past two decades. The more the government spends, the less we get per taxpayer dollar thrown at it. That is the very definition of a falling stock.
The real energy transition is toward natural gas. A few weeks ago, the price of natural gas fell below $2 MMBTU, which is the lowest price level for energy after adjusting for inflation at any time in the last 20 years and probably ever in the history of mankind. Just a few years ago the price in real dollars was four times higher.
As an experiment, I went to the grocery store to find out the current price of a bottle of Evian water. The price I saw was $2.69 and can go as high as $3. This means natural gas is now less expensive than water.
This natural gas revolution has happened because of modern drilling technologies — including horizontal drilling and fracking. That technology keeps getting better and better and will continue to keep the price low for many decades to come. The pace of drilling technology improvement far outpaces the pace of depletion.
Meanwhile, natural gas has all the attributes of a wonder fuel. It is abundant, made in America, clean-burning (using natural gas reduces carbon emissions), reliable and cheap. Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy in Denver, who is one of the leading experts on drilling technologies, says “we keep finding more natural gas as the drilling technologies get better.
Environmentalists should be celebrating the natural gas revolution: It is by far the largest reason that CO2 emissions have fallen dramatically in the United States and that our air is cleaner today than at any time in 100 years. At the same time, we are finding that windmills and solar panels are far from the “clean energy” that we had hoped it would be. We now have graveyards full of retired toxic plastic and steel wind turbines that have to be buried in massive landfills or dumped in the ocean. Windmills use 4,000 times more plastic than all of the plastic straws in the world.
As we transition to more electric vehicles and hybrids, natural gas is the obvious source of electricity to power those batteries. In other words, natural gas can be used for all of America’s energy needs — including transportation.
Much of the natural gas resources in the United States are under federal lands. The Biden-Harris administration has stopped the leasing permits that are needed to find the next massive basins of oil and gas. Given that we have some $50 trillion of oil, gas and minerals in the mountains of the western states, Unleash Prosperity estimates the U.S. government could rake in well more than $1 trillion in revenues from leases and other taxes by drilling and mining for these resources.
So, why is the climate change industrial complex against natural gas, when it is the long-term solution (combined with nuclear power — to all of the globe’s energy needs? Instead, they have waged a war against natural gas — apparently, because it is too cheap and too abundant.
Why use natural gas when you can use expensive and completely unreliable wind power? The left is morbidly afraid of gas because they have bet on the wrong horse and have foolishly invested hundreds of billions of dollars of their own and taxpayers’ money in these unproductive technologies.
The only thing that is holding back our boundless natural gas future is government. We need permits for more LNG terminals, leases for drilling and pipelines so we can transport our natural gas resources to every region of the country and export it across the world.
Former President Donald Trump is for all of this. Vice President Kamala Harris is on the record as being against fracking and wanting to ban it. Can you think of anything dumber?
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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