Don’t fall for Biden’s centrist head fake
Washington Examiner
Environmentalists justifiably feel betrayed by President Joe Biden. As a candidate, he promised, “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period.” But last week, the president broke that promise by approving an oil project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day and employ 2,500 workers.
We’re glad he did, but you can understand why climate activists at San Francisco-based Earthjustice were furious and called the project’s approval “a carbon bomb.”
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The reasoning for Biden’s flip-flop on oil production isn’t a big mystery. The Progressive Policy Institute’s Paul Bledsoe frankly characterized the decision-making process: “I think the White House feels the president has strong climate credentials but that he does need to reach out to working-class voters in swing states who care about gasoline prices.” In other words, it was cynical political calculation; Biden didn’t have a Damascene conversion on the road to Alaska’s North Slope.
Biden’s decision to greenlight this one project, hundreds of miles away from Alaska’s biggest city, deep in the frozen tundra, has nothing to do with some technocratic weighing of carbon emissions and oil prices. It has everything to do with winning over centrist voters in the Midwest.
It’s the headline that matters, not the actual policy, which is why voters should be wary and wait to see if Biden follows through and makes sure this project becomes reality. For, on the same day Biden announced the Willow project, he also banned oil development in the Beaufort Sea and the construction of any new pipelines to the Petroleum Reserve.
This still leaves open the possibility that Biden will block oil companies from developing the Willow project by denying them the permits they need to connect new wells to existing oil and gas pipelines in the area. Then there are the inevitable lawsuits, including one already filed by the Center for Biological Diversity. When Biden refused to reform the National Environmental Policy Act last year, he left projects such as Willow vulnerable to attack and delay in court. Considering how stacked the Bureau of Land Management is with hand-picked environmental activists, it is unclear how hard Biden will fight against these lawsuits in court.
Energy is not the only issue on which Biden is pretending to tack to the center. The White House recently floated the possibility of ending the crisis at the southern border by detaining families arrested as they enter the country illegally. But thanks to a 2015 court decision, the maximum time Immigration and Customs Enforcement may detain any family is 20 days. That is nowhere near enough to adjudicate an immigrant’s asylum claim, which can take years.
If all Biden does is wait 20 days to release families into the U.S., he won’t solve anything. Immigrant families spend weeks and thousands of dollars traveling thousands of miles to cross the border. An additional three weeks in detention won’t deter them. But it will make for good headlines and photos of poor families behind bars, which could persuade swing voters that Biden is trying to fix this problem.
Another Biden flip-flop has been good for the safety of Congress and the residents of the District of Columbia. The president changed his mind, or at least his intentions, on the D.C. crime bill. First, he said he would veto a congressional reversal of the D.C. Council’s new law but then agreed to sign it.
But this should not be seen as part of a larger effort by Biden to correct Democratic malfeasance on crime across the country. Nothing was said about all their efforts to let criminals go free in California, Illinois, New York, and elsewhere.
There has been no real evolution in any of Biden’s thinking or policies on energy, immigration, or crime. He is just doing the bare minimum to separate himself from the more radical elements of his party without actually challenging them.