Drill, baby, drill

US President-elect Donald Trump believes as strongly as ever that man-caused climate change is a hoax. During the election campaign, he blamed the Biden administration for the high cost of gasoline (and of everything else) for its failure to encourage fossil fuel energy production. The Biden administration countered that, actually, the US under his administration had become more than energy-sufficient, it had been exporting Made in America oil and gas. This puzzles the neutral observer: Didn't Biden run on a transition-to-clean-energy platform? Anyway, the electorate apparently trusted Trump's word rather than that of climatologists, giving him a winning majority in both popular vote and electoral college. The president-elect has already given oil and gas companies with offshore and onshore operations notice to prepare to «drill, baby, drill.»

In fairness to President Biden, he did transform the US into a leader in the transition to a clean energy campaign. His administration has raised the consciousness of the people to the benefits brought by clean energy. Reducing the use of fossil fuels can improve health and bring down the number and severity of natural disasters. His administration has thus reportedly achieved a reduction in gas emissions by inspiring the use of a wide variety of innovations, from the electric vehicle to technologies entrapping carbon dioxide to a drug that after ingesting prevents livestock from releasing methane into the atmosphere.

But Biden no less than Trump must have also realized that the world cannot do without fossil fuels. Just reducing the production of fossil fuels carries with it a political risk; that it will raise the price of gasoline to the irritation of voters. Biden consequently had Ukraine President Zelenskyy cautioned when the latter was bombing oil and gas plants, and refineries in Russia. He did not touch fracking in Pennsylvania despite water bursting into flame in areas close to fracking operations. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris might have lost the swing state because voters suspected her of opposing fracking despite her disavowals.

It is widely doubted that fossil fuels will ever disappear in the lives of