The answer may amaze you! Er, no it doesn’t, but the fact that two key Senate Democrats have raised the question publicly might. Joe Manchin and Jon Tester have rebuked the White House this morning for playing footsie with Venezuela and Iran while stiffing the American oil industry:

Tester, Dem from Montana, on talk of importing Venezuelan and Iranian energy to offset Russian ban: "We shouldn't be advancing other countries who don't share our values."

Manchin: "If we are asking the rest of the world to step up, let's show that we're going to step up." pic.twitter.com/KHYeNYqoGF

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 8, 2022

“Go back to the policies we’ve had before,” Manchin tells CNN’s Manu Raju. “That’s all we’re asking for.”

That’s all most Americans want too — a return to the oil-production policies of the Trump administration that resulted in net energy independence. Biden’s EOs and other regulatory actions to restrict oil leases made it more difficult for US producers to keep pace with a post-pandemic growth curve, for one thing. Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline made it more difficult to increase imports from Canada as a buffer to American production, too.

Tester’s complaint has more to do with strategic considerations than political or economic incentives, but Manchin’s demand also speaks to strategic implications of energy policy. Ramped-up American production and exports would drive down global oil prices, perhaps at first in the futures markets but eventually in the spot markets as well. That would force Russia and Iran to sell at lower prices, cutting into their sole source of external hard-currency revenue and reducing their strategic power (and tactical power too).

Tester and Manchin must be hearing earfuls from angry constituents at the moment to go out this far in public against Biden’s Green New Deal moves. Their colleagues in the caucus are certainly worried about voter anger over higher gas prices, which began rising months ago even without the war in Ukraine. Maggie Hassan, facing a brutal re-election campaign in New Hampshire, tried to blame “Big Oil” for holding back production, but it was her pandering to the Sierra Club and Biden’s pandering to Luddite progressives that created this problem and squandered all of the strategic advantages handed to Biden at the beginning of his term.

By the way, the questions about energy dependence as a result of letting environmentalists drive policy aren’t just being asked in the US. Europeans have also begun rethinking their refusal to drill for their own energy — or at least look for more reliable partners:

The European Commission on Tuesday outlined ambitious proposals to “make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030.” …

“We must become independent from Russian oil, coal and gas,” the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said in a news release. “We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us.”

The proposals will probably be a huge boon for a variety of energy businesses, from the suppliers of liquefied natural gas in Qatar and around the Gulf of Mexico to builders of solar energy parks and offshore wind farms. The question is whether they can be executed rapidly enough to prevent further harm to household finances and the broader economy.

“If we react to the current crisis with a warlike reaction,” said Marco Alvera, chief executive of Snam, the Italian natural gas company, “we can do a lot in six months.”

Eventually, Europe will have to answer the same basic question, though: why not drill for our own natural gas and oil rather than simply outsource the supposed environmental issues to other countries? Why give up strategic advantages that accrue with controlling one’s own energy resources?

All of this makes Biden’s blather about his climate-change agenda at the State of the Union speech look even more out of touch than it did a week ago. Not even a war in Ukraine woke Biden up from his Green New Deal dream. And even now, Biden wants to lead the US into a dependence nightmare that puts US energy at the mercy of Iranian mullahs and a Venezuelan tyrant rather than seize the initiative and start driving events rather than react to them. Senate Democrats may actually be waking up to Biden’s unreality themselves — if potentially too late to save their majority.