Liam Denning, Columnist

Gas Prices Shouldn’t Slow Biden’s Green Push

The pandemic’s hit to energy demand could give the president some breathing room.

February 8, 2021 at 1:30 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Nothing to fear here.
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When it comes to battling climate change, President Joe Biden is a man in a hurry. As he should be. Democrats cling to a Senate majority by Vice President Kamala Harris’s fingertips, and midterms are just 21 months away.

Biden made no secret of his green ambitions when campaigning. Still, his flurry of executive orders took the energy industry aback. Some of that was just the usual Pavlovian response to any mention of regulation. The Keystone XL pipeline expansion, for example, was on life support anyway, and the plug was all but pulled the day Biden won. But his other actions, such as the temporary suspension of permitting and the longer suspension of leasing for drilling on federal lands, were quicker and broader than anticipated.