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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it has been a month since the Biden administration announced its de facto ban on new export permits for America's abundant stores of natural gas; 1 month since the President chose to bring growth in a critical sector of our economy, with massive, global consequences, to a screeching halt.

At the risk of understating things, the condemnations of President Biden's decision were swift and full-throated, and it is not hard to understand why. With the stroke of a pen, the President threatened the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Americans, from Texas to Pennsylvania, who produce and transport natural gas.

From the outset, the administration tried to cast the freeze as an effort to look out for American consumers, but the facts tell a different story. By the Energy Department's own analysis, the United States has more than enough natural gas to meet both domestic and export demand.

In fact, if the Biden administration was really concerned about access to one of the Nation's most abundant, reliable, and affordable energy sources, they would release their stranglehold on domestic energy exploration and energy infrastructure. Millions of Americans live near massive natural gas reserves but can't reap the benefits because the President is afraid of upsetting climate activists by investing in safe and efficient energy infrastructure.

Some of the most scathing criticism of the President's decision has come from his own former Democratic colleagues. As former Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana observed last month, the administration's so- called ``pause'' on LNG export permits was like ``throwing a match in a bale of hay.''

America's allies and partners already doubt our resolve to deter common adversaries, but now the world wonders why the Biden administration just handed them a gift.

Just last week, a German state-owned energy company confirmed that it would actually keep an LNG supply contract with Putin. But it gets worse. The company had a contract in hand to begin purchasing American LNG instead until the administration announced its freeze last month. In other words, the President of the United States essentially told a NATO ally to keep on enriching the dictator responsible for the first major land war in Europe since 1945.

To make matters worse, it is increasingly clear that President Biden's decision had another adversary's fingerprints all over it. Leftwing activists have been in the driver's seat of the President's energy policy since day one. That much is not news, but his top climate advisers taking private meetings with influencers on a Chinese-owned social media platform or the campaign to ban LNG permits being driven by a private foundation invested heavily in China's funds--that is news.

LNG exports are one of the only areas of U.S.-China trade in which the PRC is reliant on the United States. Beijing would be all too happy for an excuse to buy less clean U.S. energy and more of what President Biden's Energy Secretary called ``the dirtiest form of natural gas on Earth''--Russian LNG. Well, it appears that President Biden has given our top strategic adversary precisely such an excuse.

It is hard to understand the President's decision as anything other than a compulsive, shortsighted grab for more fleeting praise from his activist base. Clearly, it makes no strategic or economic sense. As one expert analyst and Deputy National Security Advisor under the previous administration put it, ``Our partners and allies are baffled and [our] adversaries are pleased. That's never a good formula.''

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