Under Biden, America is going the way of Venezuela

Venezuela was once a rich and prosperous nation. Blessed with huge oil deposits and vast mineral reserves, its economic success rivaled that of the United States. Piece by piece the country self-destructed and is now an economic disaster. It still has all the natural resources that made it rich, but its own government destroyed it.

We are watching a similar situation play out in real time in our own country. The Biden administration is doing the bidding of radical environmentalists. It is attempting to force the United States to make the change from cheap, abundant and dependable sources of energy, such as nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas and hydroelectric to wind turbines and solar panels.

A huge problem with this idea is that wind turbines and solar panels are not dependable. Wind turbines only produce energy when the wind is blowing at certain speeds and solar panels only produce electricity when the sun shines. The technology to store the energy they produce does not exist.

The major hurdle environmental extremists face in their quest is the fact that only 5% of the energy produced in the United States is what they consider environmentally friendly. So, their goal is to destroy 95% of our energy sector and replace it with energy sources they approve of.

Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, clearly stated the environmental goal of the Biden administration at a recent environmental conference. He proclaimed: “So, this year we have to implement these promises and what it means is, we have to de-carbonize the power sector five times faster than we are right now. We have to deploy renewables five times faster than we are right now. We have to transition to electric vehicles 20 times faster than we are now. And we have to fully transition to a resilient net-zero economy. Faster.”

During his current trip to the Indio-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, President Joe Biden openly concurred with what Kerry said. When talking about the U.S. economy, he characterized the increased cost of gasoline as an “incredible transition.”

Biden continued: “When it comes to gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”

What they’re doing will destroy our economy and our country. We are already seeing the disastrous results of their actions with record energy prices and runaway inflation.

Less than two years ago under the Trump administration, our country was totally energy independent. Our fuel prices were low and our economy was booming. We were producing more energy than we were consuming, and oil companies had found vast new reserves that could potentially fuel the U.S. for centuries. Now we are facing record fuel prices and potential energy shortages.

Even if you believe in man-caused climate change, which I, thousands of scientists and tens of millions of Americans don’t, it’s hard to justify the damage inflicted upon our people and our country by the consequences of these policies.

One aspect of our energy situation that most Americans don’t understand is the link between our food supply and present forms of energy.

The ammonia in nitrogen fertilizer that grows half of the world’s food supply is made from natural gas. Russia and Ukraine together produce half of the fertilizer used in the U.S. and fertilizer prices have quadrupled. And, the fuel that is needed to plant and harvest our food has reached record highs.

The title to a recent article in the Epoch Times read: “U.S. and world gripped by fertilizer crisis.” Its subtitle read: “Fertilizer shortages should be used to hasten environmental transitions, official says.”

There are fanatics among the elite environmentalists who truly believe that they are saving the world and that world hunger and starvation is a price that we should be willing to pay to force the world transition to non-carbon fuels.

The environmentalist’s answer to ending the use of processed nitrogen fertilizer is to encourage the use of organic fertilizer. Recently, the island nation of Sri Lanka took the environmental challenge. It abandoned chemical fertilizer and switched its agricultural system to organic. It was a complete disaster.

When speaking about Sri Lankan farmers, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa recently stated: “Sri Lanka is now literally on the verge of famine, because they’ve had massive crop failures.”

Farmers have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the disastrous experiment. Food shortages in Sri Lanka have brought on anti-government protests and forced two state of emergency proclamations in two months. And as I noted in a previous column, Germany, a country smaller than Montana, also listened to the radical environmental narrative. It did away with all the energy sources that environmentalists despise and replaced them with environmentally approved sources.

Germany spent more than $600 billion and it has been a complete failure. Now it is dependent on a pipeline from Russia for a huge percentage of its energy needs and Germans pay three times what we pay for energy.

As I said before: Should we follow these people off this cliff?

Because of great advances in research and technology, our country has not suffered from food insecurity since World War II and the Great Depression. Now our population takes food for granted.

One giant swoop of incompetent bureaucratic bungling by the Biden administration recently proved how fragile our food supply is. The Abbot Labs plant that produces 43% of the baby formula in our country was shut down for months by government bureaucrats. Now there are empty shelves across our country and mothers are panicking.

The war between Ukraine and Russia, the destructive policies of the Biden administration and environmental extremists could very well be the catalyst that brings back world hunger.

Dugger retired as a journeyman carpenter from Clearwater Paper. He lives in Lewiston.