Washington Examiner highlighted advocate calls to phase out America's fossil fuel reliance, quoting AEE's Nat Kreamer on the national security impacts. Read snippets below and the full article here.
IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN: High and rising costs for oil are compounding the price of gasoline to record national averages, and the pressure is on President Joe Biden to bring short term relief by encouraging more extraction of fossil fuels.
But Biden’s key green constituencies are campaigning hard for the opposite approach, with some asserting his reputation as a climate change leader is on the line...
“The position of ‘I need to just drill more’ is like somebody who got drunk the night before, threw up, and decided the way to fix it is to have a Bloody Mary,” Nat Kreamer, CEO of the green energy industry group Advanced Energy Economy, told Jeremy.
Kreamer, who did four Special Forces tours in Afghanistan and helped found solar firm Sunrun after duty, said his position was formed partly by witnessing consequences of wars in the Middle East where enemies were “financed by petro dollars.”
He argued, as have many others who share his perspective, that the volatility we are seeing in prices for oil, gasoline, and in markets generally is inherent in fuel commodities, making stronger the case for shirking them in favor of deploying more alternatives sources.
For national security’s sake: Kreamer said further that there are special risks for the West in trading one fossil fuel source for a competitor produced elsewhere as Republicans, oil and gas industry groups, and European leaders, too, have proposed doing to replace the EU’s Russian natural gas supplies with LNG from allied nations.
“An LNG tanker going across the North Atlantic to Germany, which is — that's going to be their quick answer... One Kilo-class Russian submarine, it doesn’t take much for them to take a billion-dollar tanker and blow it up,” Kreamer said. “When you have clean energy technologies, they're by definition distributed in many cases. They're resilient.”
Read the full article here.