Biden’s Green Energy Money Is Sugar on a Poison Pill

We’ve just had the hottest summer in recorded history, with runaway wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, ruinous floods from Slovenia, Sudan and Hong Kong to Vermont and Brazil. We’ve seen nearly half of the world’s ocean waters in a heat wave, having absorbed some 90 percent of the heat produced by our greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid those catastrophes a new report from Oil Change International, out Sept. 12, showed that despite its rhetoric on climate leadership, the United States accounts for one-third of planned oil and gas expansion across the globe between now and 2050 — more than any other nation.

President Biden, with both help and hindrance from Congress, has brought us federal funding for clean technologies. That’s a crucial step but brutally inadequate: If we keep drilling, pumping and using oil and gas, green-energy money will remain a sprinkling of sugar on a poison pill.

In advance of this year’s United Nations Climate Ambition Summit on Wednesday, Mr. Biden has made concessions to the environmental lobby, canceling oil and gas leases in high-profile Alaska refuges and reserves. Those gestures are welcome, but also easy. The more difficult and more essential task is to remove incentives for oil and gas companies to continue their frantic pace of production, transport and profiteering.

The president’s answer to the climate crisis has been, in one word, more: more money for solar and wind, sure! But also more oil production and more exports of planet-heating fuels. More of everything! It’s the path of least resistance. And after all, more is the American way.

But more won’t cut it with fossil fuels, whether we’re using them ourselves or selling them to other countries. U.S. crude oil exports have gone up almost 850 percent since an important export ban was lifted in 2015, and in 2023 domestic oil production will hit an all-time high. Cleaning up our domestic portfolio won’t mean much if we keep shipping out dirty fuels to be combusted abroad.