As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to end fossil fuel use in America.

Biden said, there’ll be “no more drilling,” “no more pipelines.”

Within hours of taking office, President Biden ended construction on the Keystone XL pipeline and began imposing leasing and drilling moratoriums, slow-walking permits, pressuring banks not to fund oil companies, and taking other steps to turn his promises into policies.

However, with a little boost from President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, President Biden’s war on fossil fuels brought pesky political problems — most prominently, skyrocketing fuel costs.

Gasoline and diesel prices more than doubled since November of 2020; they reached $9.50 per gallon in parts of California by mid-June 2022.

Farmers, families, commuters, and truckers cried foul. Soaring food prices worsened their moods. Mr. Biden’s approval rightfully plummeted.

But because permitting more drilling would anger allies focused on the catechism of climate cataclysm, Team Biden asked Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran to increase their oil production and exports to the U.S. and Europe.

It also decided to release millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s emergency stockpiles.

The administration said this would “help lower energy costs,” “reduce the pain Americans are feeling at the pump,” and combat the “Putin price hike.”

However, Team Biden sent some 5,000,000 barrels of this oil overseas.

Even more incredibly, it sold 950,000 barrels ($104,500,000 worth) to the China Petrochemical Corporation. That’s China as in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Not Taiwan. The optics are not good.

But for an administration (and Democratic Party) focused on “racial justice” and America’s terrible legacy of slavery, the public relations will only get worse, as the realities of the “green energy transition” become clear.

First, this energy is not clean, green, renewable, or sustainable.

The sheer numbers of wind turbines, solar panels, and vehicle and backup batteries defy imagination.

Just as President Biden’s proposal for 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power would require 2,500 enormous 800-foot-tall 12-megawatt turbines.

Even if they operated at full capacity 24/7, they wouldn’t meet peak summertime electricity needs for New York State, much less the entire United States.

But they would require millions of tons of raw materials — steel, aluminum, copper, fiberglass, concrete, and others — whose extraction, processing, and refining are land-intensive and polluting.

Billions of solar panels would require massive amounts of polysilicon and other materials. Billions of battery modules would require prodigious quantities of cobalt, nickel, lithium, rare earth elements, copper, and other metals. New transmission lines — still more.

Second, American environmentalists (including stalwart climate campaigners) steadfastly oppose these activities anywhere in the U.S.

The supply chains for most of these materials run through China — which controls the mining (in Mongolia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere), processing (in China and Mongolia), and increasingly manufacturing (in China).

China and the CCP can do this because they have acquired mining properties all over the world; have huge coal-fired power plants to generate cheap electricity; don’t bother with air or water pollution control, mined land reclamation, or workplace safety standards required in Western countries.

Additionally, they can utilize dirt-cheap, slave, and child labor, most notably in Africa and the Uyghur territories.

Some 40,000 children already labor with their parents in the Democratic Republic of Congo cobalt mines, for a few dollars a day, under threats of cave-ins, and with constant exposure to toxic air, mud, dust, and water — just to meet today’s cobalt needs.

Those needs would skyrocket under a U.S. Green New Deal, and vastly more under an international “energy transition.”

The cobalt ore is processed in China, under equally abominable safety and pollution conditions. Air and water pollution and an enormous toxic waste dump for rare earth effluents in Inner Mongolia have created serious health issues for plant workers and local residents.

China also uses Uyghur slave labor to manufacture solar panels it sells to the United States. And Mr. Biden wants to suspend tariffs on Chinese solar panels, to make importing them even easier and cheaper.

Over the past decade, the United States significantly reduced its (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide emissions, largely by replacing coal-fired electricity generation with natural gas.

Meanwhile, in 2020 alone, China put 38,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants into operation. Beijing is also building, planning, or financing more than 300 coal plants in Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, African countries, and elsewhere.

The United States could easily go from being a net oil and gas exporter two years ago to being almost totally dependent on often unfriendly foreign sources for the materials required for our “renewable” energy, economy, manufacturing, living standards, healthcare, communication, transportation, and national defense.

Perhaps worse, every increase in “green” energy makes the United States more complicit in slavery, eco-colonialism, and environmental degradation.

Every increase makes us more reliant on China which, like Russia, increasingly wields its energy, mineral, and economic power as a weapon, to keep its client countries in line, dependent, and subservient.

This is not the direction we should be going in the land of the free, this nation that reflects on its past sins, seeks a more perfect union, and endeavors to be a global leader in environmental protection and human rights.

It’s time for President Biden, Congress, and America to recognize reality and chart a new course. This piece originally appeared at Newsmax.com and has been republished here with permission.