The White House’s climate agenda has hit some turbulence amid record U.S. oil production and push-back from some in agriculture.
You won’t hear the president boast about it, the Washington Post reports, but the U.S. is producing more than 13 million barrels of oil a day—a record, even as his climate spending soars.
But gas prices have eased, key to Biden’s reelection chances, with oil project approvals in Alaska and West Virginia as Biden tries to walk a political tightrope between consumers and environmentalists.
Meantime, Republicans like Doug LaMalfa of California’s rural 1st District are pushing back on the president’s climate agenda. He says, “In planting crops, in transporting anything. If you’ve got it, a truck brought it. It’s probably a diesel-powered truck, as you see so many efforts, failed efforts of electrifying vehicles, cars, trucks, etc. Oh, there’s a few out there, getting around, yes, but not on a dependable basis, to keep our supply chain going.”
And after COP 28 in Dubai, LaMalfa says, “You have elites over at conferences like this, saying ‘we need to cut back on meat, we need to cut out agriculture.’ They want us to cut 30 percent of our agriculture. Well, there’s already a food shortage in much of the world, and even in some of our urban areas in this country, as we call them, food ‘deserts.’ You want to depend on it coming from somewhere else? That works really great. Wait until they have a food embargo, like the fuel embargoes we had in the Seventies.”
And while Agriculture has embraced some of Biden’s climate agenda like conservation spending and carbon credits, LaMalfa and others argue it’s gone too far. He says, “So, it’s about time we put aside this nonsense of getting to some kind of zero output of carbon by 2035 or 2050 or whatever nice round number that they dream up as a goal, like my home state of California.”
LaMalfa argues the U.S. and Europe have already cut carbon emissions 10 to 15 percent, while China, India and others have done little.
