Joe Biden voters, “Green Energy” policy types and Kansas farmers who met wind farm projects in the state with a big wet kiss as they ravaged our landscapes over the past decade shouldn’t expect a Christmas card from Ukraine this year – or from anywhere else in the energy consuming world for that matter.
What they should expect is to own their share of the devastating loss of life and destruction wrought on the sovereign slavic nation by its imperial dictator to the north, as well as the coming energy and economic disaster headed our way in the United States. Because in reality, the world works just like the old children’s song says – the toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, the foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone…
It’s too much to give credit to Putin for the masterful situation in which he found himself to pursue his own dreams of rekindling the old Soviet empire, even though it’s confirmed that Russia actively funded anti-fracking and other social/environmental efforts aimed at weakening Europe’s fossil fuel profile over the years. The wave of Green hysteria took root across Europe, leading to a massive ramp-up in expensive and inefficient wind power in Germany, for instance. That move led to skyrocketing home electricity bills in the Deutschland and a growing dependence on Russia for its burgeoning gas and oil production to make up for the needs the ridiculous, subsidized wind farms failed to produce.
If it isn’t clear by now, dependence is vulnerability.
The problem with wind power of course is that it can’t produce enough juice to meet people’s needs. Relying on it makes populations more dependent of foreign sources of carbon fuels – sources that actually work – which have to be bought to maintain real power levels. But the hipness of wind farms and the Greta Thunberg guilt trip in Europe that forced more Russian carbon energy sales was nothing more than a cash cow for Putin until the U.S. elected the bumbling Joe Biden president.
Putin must have been giddy – or as giddy as a former KGB agent can be – at the news Biden’s first actions as president would be to choke off the thriving U.S. energy sector that had for the first time in modern history made the U.S. independent of foreign energy. Following the leftist and Putin-benefiting playbook, Biden forced the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Agreement and stopped new oil and gas leases on federal lands. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, stepped up stagnating environmental rules on oil and gas emissions and increased the “social cost of carbon” – another ridiculous bureaucratic metric used by the federal environmental wonks and even some state regulators to help thwart policies that would foster dependable oil and coal as energy sources.
Another sad reality is that our own Kansas landowners played their role in this disaster as well.
Though leftist Green Energy types imbedded in the federal government created the subsidy-dependent wind farm industry and forced electric utilities into purchasing their outrageously inefficient and expensive power, it was farmers and landowners in rural Kansas and across the rest of the Midwest who contracted their land for the thousands of industrial turbine sites that grew this net-loss industry. Home electricity bills have shown the spiking results of the growth of wind power. Following the disastrous path of Europe, realty-disconnected power company executives are now actively shutting down coal and gas fired electric plants that provide firm power when the wind doesn’t blow.
As in Europe, the wind industry fantasy has made the U.S. more dependent on foreign energy. Land owners who got in bed with this devil for a few pieces of silver can’t escape some of the blame.
With Biden’s deadly Keystone Cops performance in his retreat from Afghanistan, Putin realized an invigorating trifecta. Nations now depended on his country for energy couldn’t shake those shackles fast enough to thwart his aggression, and a weakling, incompetent U.S. president lacked the gumption to realize his own nation’s challenges much less lead the West to confront a Russia on the march.
In a modern world faced with despots, energy is a weapon. Nations that choose to curtail it in pursuit of some Utopian fantasy do so at their own peril.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.