Ever since President Joe Biden took office, the federal tone toward the oil and gas industry has shifted dramatically. It started when Biden took sweeping action in his first days in office to cancel the Keystone oil pipeline and ban new drilling leases on public lands. Now, the federal government is pressuring big banks to avoid lending to or investing in the fossil fuel industry, a move that has prompted pushback by some Republican-led states.
All of this creates strong headwinds for the industry. "You are seeing increasing pressure on banks and lending institutions to defund fossil investment," says David Holt, president of the Consumer Energy Alliance.
Holt tells KTRH that this aggressive push toward so-called "green energy" is completely misguided. "There's a defund effort across the board that is largely divorced from reality," he says. "The fact that the United States and the world will continue to need fossil energy for a significant percentage of our overall energy demands, is kind of lost on the movement."
Even shifting to "clean" energy will require getting a little dirty. "If we're going to move to renewables, we're going to need more critical minerals, which means more mining, which means we have to make sure we are making the proper investments there," says Holt.
The bottom line is regardless of the Biden administration's posturing, the left's green agenda remains largely a pipe dream. "We're going to have to continue to use fossil energy for the foreseeable future, in order to meet affordable, reliable, and environmentally responsible energy production," says Holt. "It's just a fact."