RICH LOWRY: Trump can’t reverse Biden energy policies soon enough

Rarely has there been a more concerted effort by a country’s leadership to eliminate a source of national strength than the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels.

As President Joe Biden prepares to shuffle off the stage, he’s attempting to burnish his tarnished legacy with last-minute actions. To that end, he has banned new offshore drilling along an enormous swath of the U.S. coastline as part of — as a statement put it — “the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in our country’s history.”

“Ambitious” is one word for it; “perverse” is a better one.

As the United States has sprinted ahead of the rest of the world economically, in part thanks to revolutionary advances in oil and gas production, the Biden administration has worked to fasten around our neck the same green albatross dragging down EU economies. If you think Germany, an increasingly sclerotic economy enfeebled by self-imposed high energy costs, is a model, the Biden agenda has a lot of appeal.

The offshore ban is an attempt by Biden, in the sad twilight of his presidency, to impose his policy preference going forward. It’s not a trifling matter; the act affects 625 million acres, a greater area than the Louisiana Purchase. Biden is exploiting the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953. The contention is that the law gives the president power to ban oil and gas leasing from federal waters, without lending a subsequent president the ability to revoke the prohibition.

This would be a strange way for the statute to work, although one federal judge upheld this interpretation during the first Trump administration. Offshore drilling is an important part of our energy picture, accounting for 14 percent of crude oil production, and Trump should enlist Congress to reverse the Biden ban.

We shouldn’t deny ourselves any potential resources, because the story of recent decades is technological innovation opening up unanticipated vistas. Ohio and Pennsylvania as natural gas powerhouses? North Dakota as a major oil producer? Texas production increasing by more than 100 percent over the past decade? This is what human ingenuity has wrought.

Thankfully, there are limits to how much the federal government can crimp oil and gas production. Although Biden never talked about it, the country has been producing slightly more crude oil than it did at the peak during Trump’s first term. Writing about how the United States has outgrown other advanced economies, The Economist noted, “The shale-oil revolution has driven perhaps a tenth of its economic growth since the early 2000s.”

The booming production has drastically diminished the influence of OPEC, an achievement that would have been celebrated by both political parties at any time over the past 50 years.

Now, Trump is in position to double down on a national asset. Among other things, he’ll need to work to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s green subsidies that are distorting electricity markets, make it easier to build pipelines and infrastructure, loosen up on permitting restrictions, end the pause on new natural gas export terminals and roll back the archipelago of rules meant to phase out gas-powered cars and force electric vehicles on the public.

America is an oil and gas superpower. It should be unapologetic about it, and leverage every last drop for our economic and geopolitical advantage.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.