Extreme Temperature Diary- Wednesday September 4th, 2024/Main Topic: Wagging the Finger at Biden for Oil Production – Guy On Climate
Dear Diary. I am a loyal Democrat with my fingers crossed that the majority of this country will come to its senses by electing Kamala Harris and oust Trump, who through his 2025 plan would shut down climate research and basically try to roll back all climate initiatives that have taken place the last twenty years.
That stated, the current U.S. President is caught proverbially between a rock and a hard place in association with oil. Should the price of gas get too high, at about above $3.20 a gallon for most of the United States, that could affect the election. Therefore, Biden has allowed much more drilling than climate activists wanted to happen. That has turned off some young voters along with the Gazan situation who wanted Biden to have a spine on both issues.
America, like most of the world, is addicted to oil much like heroin addicts. At some point we need to stop using this drug and go through necessary withdrawal symptoms. The only cushions should be more and more electric vehicles and mass transportation, two items that we have been much too slow to embrace.
Here is an article from Common Dreams describing Biden’s no no’s:
‘You Cannot In Fact Do Both’: Biden Slammed for Bragging About Oil Production | Common Dreams
 Campaigners with the Sunrise Movement assembled at the headquarters of President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign in Wilmington, Delaware on February 12, 2024. (Photo: Sunrise Movement)
‘You Cannot In Fact Do Both’: Biden Slammed for Bragging About Oil Production“No you cannot ‘do both.’ That would be like sending 50,000 tons of lethal weapons to a brutal, murderous regime and then telling them you ‘want a cease-fire,'” said Climate Defiance. Brett Wilkins
Sep 03, 2024
Climate campaigners this week rebuked recent claims by U.S. President Joe Biden—and Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee—that the United States can simultaneously increase fossil fuel production and transition to a clean energy future.
On Saturday, Biden boasted on social media that “on my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs—without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy.”
“We’re America,” the president added. “We can do both.”
In a simultaneous swipe at the Biden administration’s climate record and support for Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, the direct action group Climate Defiance retorted: “No you cannot ‘do both.’ That would be like sending 50,000 tons of lethal weapons to a brutal, murderous regime and then telling them you ‘want a cease-fire.'”
Other climate groups and experts have also challenged Biden’s position in recent days.
Climate scientist Peter Kalmus said on social media, “This is horrifying.”
Fridays for Future USA contended, “You cannot in fact do both.”
“You can’t expand fossil fuels on Monday, expand renewables on Tuesday, and call it climate action on Wednesday,” the youth-led movement added. “Do better.”
Noting that Harris has also claimed that “we can do both,” author and professor Genevieve Guenther asserted: “‘We can do both’ is apparently the climate and energy messaging on which the Harris campaign has settled. (Harris used the identical phrase in her CNN interview.) I understand it as a message that meets the moment. But it’s not true, and I hope they don’t believe it.”
Despite lofty rhetoric and campaign pledges to center climate action—including by stopping new fossil fuel drilling on public lands—Biden oversaw the approval of more new permits for drilling on public land during his first two years in office than former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, did in 2017 and 2018.
The Biden administration has also held fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved the highly controversial Willow project, Mountain Valley Pipeline, and increased liquefied natural gas production and export before pausing LNG exports earlier this year.
Despite the pause—which campaigners are urging the Biden administration to make permanent—the president has also overseen what climate defenders have called a “ staggering” LNG expansion, including Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than the European Union’s combined greenhouse gas footprint.
Biden also drew ridicule last year after he said he has “practically” declared a climate emergency—a longtime demand of activists. The president’s claim came during a speech touting the clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates hundreds of billions of dollars for climate-mitigating investments but also includes policies that anger green groups.
Climate campaigners widely agree that a Harris administration would be far preferable to one led by the climate science-denying Trump, one of whose mottos is “Drill, Baby, Drill.” During his first term, Trump rolled back numerous climate-focused regulations and aggressively expanded U.S. fossil fuel production. Biden has reversed some of Trump’s most impactful attacks on climate and environmental protections.
In April, Trump reportedly told fossil fuel executives that a $1 billion investment in his campaign would be a great deal for them due to all the taxes and regulations they would avoid under his administration.
Meanwhile, Harris is widely expected to continue many of Biden’s climate and energy policies, including embracing fracked methane gas, which she once said she wanted to ban.
In another “we can do both” moment, Harris told CNN last week that “what I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
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Brett Wilkins
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
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Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
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