(The Epoch Times)—In a little-noticed statement slipped out on Jan. 26, the Biden administration pulled another plank out from under America’s energy security and future prosperity. Declaring the climate crisis “the existential threat of our time,” President Joe Biden announced that his administration was imposing a “temporary pause on pending decisions of liquified natural gas (LNG) exports.”
In other words, the administration—which was already slow-walking energy regulatory approvals—is simply not going to green-light any new LNG project, including any new terminals, any new capacity expansion or upgrades, or any new export licenses, for the foreseeable and indeterminate future.
This decision, intended as a political concession to the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party, further undermines U.S. energy independence. The action freezes the industry and effectively paralyzes any potential future investment toward the growth, development, and productive enhancement of a critical energy resource.
The knock-on effect of this will be higher future energy costs for American businesses and consumers and a weakening of the U.S. energy industry. The “pause” deters foreign buyers in Asia and Latin America from considering the United States as a reliable supplier for their growing LNG demand, hurting our export economy. More consequentially, the move strengthens the hands of our global energy competitors and potential adversaries, including China, Russia, and Iran. It is a total folly.
The Biden administration has been at war with American energy independence from day one. In pursuit of a quixotic dream of zero emissions and complete migration from fossil fuels to renewables, one of the administration’s first actions (literally on President Biden’s first day in office) was to issue an executive order canceling the Keystone XL pipeline project, which, in addition to creating tens of thousands of American jobs, would have safely and cleanly delivered more than 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. refineries at low cost.
Previously approved oil and gas exploration and development leases in the Arctic were suspended on grounds of “deficiencies” in paperwork and process, and all work ceased. Regulatory agencies were given clear instructions to unleash the Kraken of bureaucratic red tape, ensuring that applicants would suffocate under the constriction of its tenacles—new approvals ground to a halt. Even before last week’s decision, LNG export applications processed by the Department of Energy took nearly a year to receive approval, compared with an average of less than two months under the former Trump administration.
Starting in November 2021, the Biden administration began to drain the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which by January 2023 had lost 265 million barrels of oil and which even to this day sits at less than half capacity. Just a few months ago, in September 2023, the Biden administration reversed Trump-era approvals and permanently canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska.
All of this begs the question, why would any company, entrepreneur, or debt-financing provider be willing to risk investing capital in an environment in which billions of dollars of work can be flushed down the toilet with the administrative stroke of a pen? The answer is obviously that no one would, and that is precisely the intended result of the Biden administration’s short-sighted actions. These complex projects take years to complete, not to mention the cost involved. Even with a new, energy-friendly administration, the risk of policy reversal—witnessed firsthand with the Trump–Biden transition—will hang like a dark and foreboding cloud over future investment decisions.
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This latest blow against American energy independence comes at a time when U.S. inventories of West Texas Intermediate crude oil in Cushing, Texas, have fallen to their lowest seasonal level in a decade. U.S. refinery capacity remains nearly 1 million barrels below pre-pandemic levels. U.S. oil rig counts are down by 110 from a year ago, and production is at its lowest level since June 2023. The SPR is at its lowest level since 1985. These are all warning signs that are being largely ignored. Energy was one of the biggest drivers of inflation in 2022. While energy prices have fallen in recent months, it is dangerous to grow complacent.
The world watched anxiously last winter as Europe nearly froze after Russian gas supply to the continent was cut off. It was U.S. LNG that came to the rescue. Europeans suddenly woke up to the dangers of reliance on foreign suppliers for their energy needs. The U.S. government seems to find nothing worthwhile to learn from Europe’s experience. But just who will come to America’s rescue if our oil and gas industry falls into disrepair and neglect? China? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? While they are all investing in and expanding their energy industries and export capabilities, they are not doing it for the sake of America’s economy or its people.
We are devouring our children’s future.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.