ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Sherrod Brown has spent the last sixteen years in the U.S. Senate cultivating a phony moderate persona for votes in Ohio while voting with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in DC.  He never lifted a finger to stop the march of Ohio jobs leaving our state and only pretended to protect Ohio manufacturers during the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade deliberations in 2009.  But recent votes for the American Recuse Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act make him an increasingly reliable vote FOR the radical Green New Deal and AGAINST Ohio’s working families.

The Green New Deal is a plan centered on aggressively transitioning to “net zero” emissions and ending the use of fossil fuels, including Ohio’s abundant and clean oil and natural gas.  Ohioans are already feeling the effects of Biden and Brown’s devastating attack on domestic energy.  They have sent our economy into a nosedive with skyrocketing inflation and gas prices, and have shuttered power plants fueled with Ohio energy.

Brown’s legislative incrementalism is cover for a radical regulatory assault being carried out by the executive branch, epitomized by EPA’s de facto ban on internal combustion engines proposed earlier this year.  This regulation, the most destructive ever submitted to the Federal Register, will wreck America’s economy, restrict consumer choice, devastate Ohio manufacturing, and place our transportation sector at the mercy of the CCP.

As the world’s dominant refiner of critical minerals used in EV batteries and cars, China will have a stranglehold on our entire economy under the misguided Biden-Brown policies.  Even minerals extracted in the U.S. will need to be shipped to China to be refined and sent back.  Such a policy would compromise the supply chains of Ohio companies investing in battery production.

Biden’s EV push is a major sticking point in the UAW contract dispute as the union is demanding more pay, shorter work weeks and longer hours as the EV transition requires fewer auto workers and union leaders fear a potential shift of jobs overseas and to right-to-work states.

Frank strongly believes canceling the Biden EV mandate should be one of the union’s top priorities and agrees with President Trump’s assertion that the mandate is a “transition to hell.” If implemented as proposed, it risks effectively ending the U.S. car industry.

The EV mandate is hardly the only threat to America’s economy.  By killing the Keystone pipeline; severely restricting offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico; initiating redundant “climate disclosure” policies at the SEC; proposing restrictions on pipeline construction at FERC; advancing a BLM rule to end drilling on federal land; abruptly canceling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge; and slashing access to the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska AFTER irresponsibly draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana for bluntly political reasons, Biden is declaring all-out war on the petroleum industry and nearly 11 million American jobs, 350,000 of which are in Ohio, generating more the $55 billion in economic impact.

The Biden-Brown goal is to hastily electrify transportation while at the same time enacting a methane tax on natural gas production and imposing an EPA power plant rule that will close coal and natural gas power plants.  These are contradictory goals that will lead to power blackouts and turn Ohio into California.

Since the Shale Revolution in the 2000s, America has become the world’s top producer of oil and of natural gas.  But because of smart innovation, emissions have simultaneously plummeted.  Frank believes fossil fuels are the least expensive, most versatile, safest, and most reliable sources of energy, the supply of which the U.S. dominates.  Their use is connected with expanding growth, prosperity, and longer lives.  He also believes America should greatly expand its production by immediately ending the Biden regulatory assault.

Frank chaired the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review, or JCARR where he established a reputation as a bureaucracy-fighter insisting on greater oversight of executive agencies and accelerating legislative review to block anti-business rules.  He also authored and cosponsored numerous bills to cut red tape and unburden Ohio businesses from burdensome job-killing regulations.  He will apply these lessons in the U.S. Senate.  He will introduce the REINS Act and work for its passage among his first priorities in the US Senate.

The real value of our oil and gas industry became clear shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 when American LNG replaced pipeline shipments of gas from Russia.  The rescue was necessary because of the EU’s embrace of carbon pricing, restrictions on oil, and a hasty switch to renewables – all out of blind subservience to the Paris Agreement which made them dependent on Russian natural gas and the destructive whims of the Putin Regime.

Even before the invasion, a true crisis was underway.  Energy prices shot up 70% during 2021, largely due to the EU’s carbon prices rising 334%.  When prices shot up even more after the invasion, plant closures gripped the EU as “de-industrialization” had arrived.  One EU diplomat admits, “Our industry is bleeding to death.”  Germany, the EU’s largest economy, is in a manufacturing free fall, with factory orders dropping a staggering 12% from June to July 2023, despite increased military production.

The EU is staring into the abyss due to policies being implemented here and now by Biden and Brown.

Frank believes EU-style, Green New Deal energy policies are dangerous threats to free enterprise and to the wellbeing of Ohio families.  He will work to defund, eliminate, disrupt, block, repeal, or derail the looming de-industrialization policies headed our way.  Ohio energy production should expand, so jobs in every other sector can expand as well.  The only realistic path to address this ongoing global energy crisis is for America to produce dramatically more energy and build the supplies needed to reduce Biden’s inflation.

Frank will work to remove America from the Paris Agreement; scrap Biden’s entire anti-fossil fuel regulatory assault; work to restore leases and access to reserves in Alaska; ensure the White House issues regular offshore leases according to law; and kill the IRA’s methane tax.  Instead of listening to the elites at Yale, WEF, and Climate Week, we should “drill, baby, drill.”

But Yale grads like Brown and “climate envoy” John Kerry care way more about “rescuing the European model” of nanny state welfare programs than they do about defending Ohio manufacturers and promoting sound energy and environmental policy.