His policies will tug against each other until the whole structure collapses.
With a stroke of the presidential pen, President Joe Biden has sabotaged domestic uranium mining and put his own energy agenda in jeopardy. Biden’s August 8 use of the Antiquities Act to declare almost a million acres of land in northern Arizona out of bounds for energy development blocks the ambitions of energy firms and nuclear advocates alike, who hitherto saw the territory as the country’s best hope for high-grade uranium. It is a curious decision for a man who alleges he is all-in on grid decarbonization. Uranium is the primary fuel for nuclear power generation, the only scalable, dispatchable, widely applicable form of carbon-free electricity known today. That the decision will exacerbate dependence on Russian uranium makes it yet more suspect.
The move is the latest evidence that the Biden environmental agenda is collapsing in on itself. The president is simultaneously tightening the vise on natural gas and coal power plants, challenging the dispatchable capacity of the nation’s power system, and driving the auto industry towards electrification, which ratchets up power demand. And yet he is going out of his way to stop development of the minerals — not only uranium, but also copper, nickel, and others — that this shift would require. (READ MORE: Biden Tanks U.S. Energy Economy)
Continue reading the entire piece here at The American Spectator
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Jordan McGillis is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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