Author: News Polite

WASHINGTON — President Biden came into office promising to tackle the planet’s climate crisis. But rising gas prices, driven in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have pushed the environmental-minded president to do something unlikely: embrace oil.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden traveled to Iowa, where he announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would temporarily lift regulations prohibiting the summertime use of an ethanol-gasoline blend known as E15, which contributes to smog during the warmer months. Mr. Biden said his government was going to waive the regulation in order to lower the price of gasoline at the pump for many Americans.

“It’s going to help some people and I’m committed to whatever I can do to help, even if it’s an extra buck or two in the pockets when they fill up, make a difference in people’s lives,” Mr. Biden said after taking a tour of a facility that produces 150 million gallons of bioethanol a year. He added later: “When you have a choice, you have competition. When you have competition, you have better prices.”

The ethanol announcement is the latest move by Mr. Biden’s White House that runs counter to promises he made as a presidential candidate to pivot the United States away from fossil fuels. The price of gas, it seems, has changed his calculus. The average cost of a gallon of gas last October was $3.32; in March, it was about $4.32.

Last month, the president proposed a new policy aimed at pressuring oil companies to drill for oil on unused land, saying the companies have thousands of “permits to dig oil if they want. Why aren’t they out pumping oil?” Mr. Biden also announced the sale of 180 million barrels of oil from the country’s strategic petroleum reserve over the next six months, the largest-ever release in history.

“It will provide a historic amount of supply for a historic amount of time,” Mr. Biden said then.

Mr. Biden has walked a careful tightrope in the weeks since U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and gas sent energy prices soaring. Even as he has implored oil producers to pump more crude, the president has sought to assure his political base that meeting the needs of today’s crisis won’t distract from the longer-term goal of moving away from the fossil fuels that drive dangerous climate change.

The president’s embrace of oil underscores his awkward position between two competing priorities: the imperative to reduce America’s use of fossil fuels and the pressure to respond to the rising price of gas.

“I don’t think when his term started Joe Biden thought he would be spending his second year tapping the strategic petroleum reserve or flying off to Des Moines to approve E15 waivers,” said Barry Rabe, a professor of political science and environmental policy at the University of Michigan.

With his broader climate change agenda and investments in wind, solar and electric vehicles largely stalled in Congress, the president’s allies say that his short-term, pro-oil actions could further disillusion the environmentally-focused voters whom Democrats need to turn out for congressional elections this fall.

“Climate voters are likely to be underwhelmed, barring a major legislative achievement,” Mr. Rabe said.

Mr. Biden’s recent actions have prompted criticism in many parts of the environmental community. Mitch Jones, managing policy director for the lobbying arm of the nonprofit group Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that the decision to waive the summertime ban on E15 is “driving us deeper into the hole of dirty fossil fuel mixtures.”

White House officials disputed the idea that Mr. Biden has shifted to embrace fossil fuels. They note that his environmental policies have always envisioned a continued reliance on oil and gas while the country makes a yearslong transition to cleaner energy sources.

And they said the current energy crisis is a stark example of why they believe Congress and Republicans should support moving to alternate forms of energy and reducing U.S. dependence on oil.

“Families need to take their kids to school and go to work, get groceries and go about their lives — and sometimes that requires gas today, this month and this year,” said Vedant Patel, a White House spokesman. “But at the very same time we must speed up — not slow down — our transition to clean energy.”

In recent weeks, Biden administration officials have announced funding to make homes energy efficient, launched a new conservation program and said the president would invoke the Defense Production Act to encourage domestic extraction and processing of minerals required to make batteries for electric vehicles.

Republicans and lobbyists for the oil and gas industries have sought to blame high gas prices on Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, arguing that prices would be lower if the White House had not pursued programs aimed at moving the country toward other forms of clean energy.

“Don’t blame the gas prices on Putin,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said earlier this month on Fox News.

He added: “It is a reaction to the shutdown of the fossil fuel industry. They go after them in every single conceivable way.”

But in reality, Mr. Biden has had limited success putting his climate agenda in place — in large part because of opposition from Republicans and the energy industry. So experts say it is difficult to blame the higher gas prices on the effects of those proposals, which have yet to be enacted.

For example, Mr. Biden proposed $300 billion in tax incentives to galvanize markets for wind and solar energy and electric vehicles. If enacted, it could cut the nation’s emissions roughly 25 percent by 2030. That legislation passed in the House, but stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.

Mr. Biden also has sought to suspend new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, a move the oil industry has maintained hurt production. Yet that policy was stopped by the courts and Mr. Biden last year auctioned off more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico — the largest lease sale in history.

Officials estimated that allowing the ethanol blend to be sold in the summer would shave 10 cents off every gallon of gasoline purchased at the approximately 2,300 stations in the country that offer it, and cast the decision as a move toward “energy independence.”

That is a small percentage of the 150,000 gas stations across the country, according to NACS, the trade association that represents convenience stores.

Mr. Biden also faces growing pressure to bring down energy prices, which helped drive the fastest rate of inflation since 1981 in March. A gallon of gas averaged $4.10 on Tuesday, according to AAA.

Ethanol is made from corn and other crops and has been mixed into some types of gasoline for years to reduce reliance on oil. But the blend’s higher volatility can contribute to smog in warmer weather. For that reason, environmental groups have traditionally objected to lifting the summertime ban. So have oil companies, which fear greater use of ethanol will cut into their sales.

How much the presence of ethanol holds down fuel prices has been a subject of debate among economists. Some experts said the decision is likely to reap larger political benefits than financial ones.

“This is still very, very small compared with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Release,” said David Victor, a climate policy expert at the University of California, San Diego. “This one is much more of a transparently political move.”

And the environmental benefits of biofuels are undercut by the way they push up prices for corn and food, some energy experts argue.

Corn state lawmakers and industry leaders have been urging Mr. Biden to fill the gap created by the United States ban on Russian oil exports with biofuels. Emily Skor, CEO of the biofuel trade association group Growth Energy, called the decision “a major win” for energy security.

“These are tough choices and I don’t think it’s anything they relish,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, a nonprofit group. “I do believe they are working to do it in a way that does not lock in decades more fossil fuel infrastructure or pollution, and I think they remain determined as ever to meet the moment on climate.”

There are reports that Russia may be planning to use — or, according to unverified reports from local officials in Mariupol, might have already used — chemical weapons as part of its offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration has already set up a Tiger Team of national security officials to consider options in the event this happens; now is the time for these discussions to become more public.

We’ve traveled this road before, badly. In August 2012, Barack Obama publicly warned the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria against employing chemical weapons. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he said. “That would change my calculus.”

It didn’t. The following year, reports emerged that al-Assad had begun using chemical weapons, culminating in a sarin gas attack in a suburb of Damascus. Obama hesitated, fearing a wider war. The British Parliament voted against taking military action in Syria. Congressional Republicans switched overnight from hawkish interventionists to skeptical isolationists. Vladimir Putin intervened with a face-saving offer to get al-Assad to voluntarily divest himself of his chemical arsenal.

The Obama administration crowed that it had achieved the best possible result. But it later came to light that al-Assad had not given up his full arsenal, and he continued to use chlorine gas against his adversaries without consequence. Putin consolidated his alliance with al-Assad, eventually leading to the introduction of Russian forces in Syria in 2015.

And it served as a predicate for Russia’s seizure of Crimea a few months later. Obama’s hesitance in Syria “was decisive,” former President François Hollande of France recently told my colleague Roger Cohen. “Decisive for American credibility, and that had consequences. After that, I believe, Mr. Putin considered Mr. Obama weak.”

This is not a scenario the Biden team can afford to repeat. What should the administration do?

Make only promises it intends to keep. Syria’s use of chemical weapons was a military, humanitarian and international-norms crisis. Obama’s red line turned it into a crisis of American credibility — one whose consequences were much farther-reaching than anything that happened in Syria.

The U.S. response should be asymmetric. President Biden issued a veiled threat to Putin when they met last June in Geneva, by mentioning the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline: “I looked at him. I said, ‘Well, how would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?’” That was fair warning.

Bring maximum diplomatic pressure to bear on Germany and other European states to end oil and gas imports from Russia. According to one estimate, those sales provide the Kremlin with $1 billion a day. Berlin remains the weakest link in the effort to create an effective sanctions regime against Russia. This position, craven now, will become morally untenable for Germany if Russia starts gassing Ukrainians. It should lead to the immediate removal of all Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT transaction system to make payments for oil and gas almost impossible.

Tear apart Russia’s supply chains. This is the project of Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, who has been looking at ways to disrupt the Kremlin’s military supply chains. It should move beyond this to every sector of the Russian economy, by automatically forbidding any company doing business in Russia to also do business in the United States and, hopefully, Europe.

Arm Ukraine with offensive weapons. “If Putin turns out to have used chemical weapons — a favorite M.O. of his, from poisoning political opponents to supporting their use in the Syrian battlefield — the West needs to respond aggressively,” the former NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis wrote me on Tuesday. “Assuming these weapons would be delivered by air, it raises the ante in giving the Ukrainians even more tools to run an effective no-fly zone, including MIG-29 fighters and possibly other platforms and drones with anti-air capability.”

Target Belarus. The Biden administration is leery of direct confrontation with Russia. It should be much less restrained in going after the Kremlin’s puppet regime. Turning off the lights in Minsk for a day would be a useful shot across the bow as the dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko ponders joining the Kremlin’s military effort.

Expect the worst. “He has no compunction against really horrific activity,” another former top American military commander told me about Aleksandr Dvornikov, Russia’s new theater commander. “That’s what he did in Aleppo.” One of the hallmarks of al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons is that he began to use them in discreet ways but grew bolder over time. The effect, the former officer warned, could be a “cumulative Srebrenica,” referring to the 1995 Serb massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Bosnia.

Plan for a long war. Make sure we can provision Ukraine with the weapons it needs for at least a year. Begin to train Ukrainian forces in advanced Western combat systems. Prepare to wall off Russia from the global economy for a decade.

We may not be able to stop Putin from using chemical weapons, but we can still avoid the fatal mistake we made a decade ago with al-Assad.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday that governments around the world, including in Russia and China, grew more repressive last year, as the State Department released its annual report on global human rights.

The department’s 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices echoes President Biden’s warnings that authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Its introduction cites “continued democratic backsliding on several continents, and creeping authoritarianism that threatens both human rights and democracy — most notably, at present, with Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.”

The report covers the past year and thus does not include details about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. But it singled out Russia’s government as a leading rights abuser, citing reports of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, physical abuse of suspects by the police and other offenses, along with frequent impunity for accused security officials.

Among the trends Mr. Blinken highlighted was the increasingly brazen way governments were “reaching across borders to threaten and attack critics.” He described a plot to kidnap a journalist in New York that prosecutors said was orchestrated by an intelligence network in Iran, and the Belarusian government’s decision to force a Ryanair passenger flight to land so that security forces could arrest a journalist on board.

Some governments were also quick to lock up critics at home, Mr. Blinken said, listing Cuba, Egypt and Russia. More than one million political prisoners are being held in 65 countries, the report found.

China’s government “continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity” against ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang and has cracked down on basic freedoms in Hong Kong, Mr. Blinken said.

One nation that saw a serious turn for the worse was Afghanistan, whose U.S.-backed government collapsed after Mr. Biden withdrew American forces from the country in August. Mr. Blinken described “a serious erosion of human rights,” including arbitrary detentions of women, protesters and journalists; reprisals against the former government’s security forces; and restrictions on the freedom of women and girls to work and study.

But the report also noted that Afghanistan’s “pre-Aug. 15 government,” led by President Ashraf Ghani, was far from an exemplary model. “Widespread disregard for the rule of law and official impunity for those responsible for human rights abuses were common,” it found — a reality that helped the Taliban maintain popular support as they battled back to power.

The report included a long list of rights violations in Saudi Arabia, America’s longtime oil-rich authoritarian partner. Among them were “serious abuses” in the conflict in neighboring Yemen, including “civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure as a result of airstrikes.”

But in an echo of Saudi protestations about the rationale for the kingdom’s military campaign in Yemen, the report noted that attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen had “caused civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure” in Saudi Arabia.

One positive sign amid the bleak landscape, Mr. Blinken said, was the successful U.S.-led effort last week to suspend Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“A country that’s perpetrating gross and systemic violations of human rights shouldn’t sit on a body whose job it is to protect those rights,” he said.

Mr. Blinken also urged the Senate to confirm Sarah Margon, Mr. Biden’s nominee to be the State Department’s top official for human rights. Ms. Margon, a former official at Human Rights Watch, was nominated nearly a year ago to be the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

Although she appeared for a confirmation hearing in September, her nomination remains stalled. The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, has criticized Ms. Margon for past tweets he depicted as unduly critical of Israel.