President Biden Has Limited Flexibility In Moving Against Oil Industry

President Biden Has Limited Flexibility In Moving Against Oil Industry

President-elect Joe Biden enters the White House this week with ambitious plans to tackle climate change and hasten the transition to a low-carbon economy. The economic and political realities of the moment, though, will make it difficult to move too aggressively against an oil and gas industry that continues to supply a majority of the country's energy. 

Biden, a centrist Democrat, has been here before. In 2009, he became Vice President to President Barack Obama, an administration that also prioritized sweeping climate legislation, including a cap-and-trade carbon emissions program. 

Those plans, which would have raised the price of gasoline, heating oil and natural gas, quickly gave way to the economic realities of the time. The country was in the midst of the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and battling unemployment rates in the double digits. 

It's no wonder that cap and trade failed to gain support despite Democratic majorities controlling both chambers of Congress at the time. Indeed, an administration that was highly critical of the practice of hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits coming into the White House ended up overseeing a doubling of U.S. crude production during its tenure. The shale revolution went on to make America the world's largest