Jennifer Granholm

Last week's White House announcement that it was pausing new permits for exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is a desperate move by a desperate president. Its principal beneficiaries are likely to be Vladimir Putin and Hamas-harboring Qatar, rather than Joe Biden’s faltering re-election campaign. The president’s political calculation is overt. “We will heed the calls of young people and frontline communities who are using who are using their voices to demand action,” Biden says. “The pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”  From a national security perspective, the pause is extraordinarily damaging.

The Democrats are having a hard time keeping their story straight on abortion. Last week, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki claimed on her MSNBC show (which should be called The Spin Zone) that “no one supports abortion up until birth,” only to then describe all of the scenarios in which she would support a late-term abortion. Vice President Kamala Harris similarly balked in a CBS interview Sunday with Margaret Brennan when asked if she would support any limits on abortion. Instead, she opted to reiterate several times that “we need to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade.” The inability of Democrats to articulate what abortion limits they support is a feature, not a bug.

The Department of Energy was besieged with ethics complaints this week as energy secretary Jennifer Granholm stares down accusations of corruption and demands from Congress that she fire Christopher Smith, a top aide and former Ford lobbyist. Senator John Barrasso, one of the most powerful Senate Republicans, faulted Granholm for “repeated lapses in upholding basic ethical standards” and demanded she “remove Ford’s lobbyist from [her] advisory board,” while laying out how Ford has basically taken over the Energy Department. “Just over two months after Ford’s top lobbyist was appointed to the [Secretary of Energy Advisory Board], the department announced a $9.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has admitted to misleading Congress, in an apparent violation of the US Code that can carry a sentence of up to five years to prison. In a Friday news dump filled just hours after the news of former president Donald Trump’s indictment, Granholm confessed to making a false statement before the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee on April 20.  At issue is Granholm telling Senator Josh Hawley that she owns no individual stocks, “whereas I should have said that I did not own any conflicting stocks,” she wrote in a letter shared with E&E News.

A politically-connected electric battery company with deep ties to the Biden administration is in trouble. Proterra could be staring down financial ruin, even though everyone from the president to his cabinet have worked overtime to boost the bus company. The Biden administration was supposed to be a ticket to ride for California-based Proterra. In 2021, it told shareholders that it was ready to “ride the wave” of taxpayer-funded incentives for vehicle electrification. It had all the right friends in all the right places. It hired a lobbying firm with extensive ties to Democratic politics weeks before Biden toured its facility.

A high-ranking Biden administration official has left the Department of Energy following months of lawsuits and inquiries from Congress about her conflicts of interest. In December, Kelly Speakes-Backman quit her job as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, to become a vice president of public affairs at Invenergy, a green energy company. One of Invenergy’s focus areas is energy storage and batteries. Electric batteries are a top priority of the Biden administration, specifically the Department of Energy. Intriguingly that was exactly what Speakes-Backman was working on both during and before she joined the administration, where she led the agency's office on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail in 2020 that he would "transition away from the oil industry,” convert to 100 percent "clean" energy by 2035, and "end fossil fuels.” Shortly after taking office, he started to make good on this pledge by suspending all new gas and oil leases on federal property and ending the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, faced with gas prices at a record high $5 per gallon and runaway inflation — aka the consequences of his own actions — Biden is looking for an off-ramp. Somehow, the Biden administration has decided it can still convince oil companies to ramp up domestic production in the short term while simultaneously promising to adhere to the president’s ambitious climate change goals in the long term.