Millions across the Atlantic face the grim reality of shivering through the cold this winter.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European leaders knew there was a real possibility of losing Russia’s natural gas supply, which accounts for some 40 percent of European imports and is a crucial energy lifeline for the continent. For months Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to use energy supplies as a strategic weapon to put pressure on nations that have applied sanctions against Moscow.

Many experts feel the worst is yet to come, with potential rationing, industrial shutdowns and possible massive economic dislocation.

“The world is experiencing the first truly global energy crisis in history,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, wrote last month.

Europe could face a “winter of discontent,” said Helima Croft, a managing director at RBC Capital Markets. “Rationing, industrial shut-ins - all of that is looming.”

“This is the most extreme energy crisis that has ever occurred in Europe,” said Alex Munton, an expert on global gas markets at Rapidan Energy Group.

Energy costs are projected to rise as much as 80 percent in Great Britain. To prepare for the gloomy forecast, a British nursery last week began telling children to wear more clothes during the winter months to help against the looming energy crisis.

In the Western Hemisphere, the Biden administration’s policy, which includes the impeding of U.S. energy production U.S. energy production and the selling of our emergency oil supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to nations like China, only exasperates the problem. Rather than handing over our emergency reserves to “bad-actor nations,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said we should be helping American families afford gas and groceries by increasing domestic production.

To ensure that reserves sold from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are not exported to adversarial nations like China, Lankford joined other Republican senators in introducing the No Emergency Crude Oil for Foreign Adversaries Act. Sen. Ted Cruz also backed the measure, maintaining that exporting SPR oil to China poses a direct threat to American security.

Oklahoma congressman Markwayne Mullin has pointed out that the U.S. is 100 percent dependent on imports for 17 key mineral resources and more than 50 percent dependent on imports for another 29 mineral commodities even though most are available in the U.S.

Those statistics lead us to another painful report that shows the ineptitude of this administration’s energy policy.

In an investigative report earlier this month, NPR reported that America made a breakthrough battery discovery and then gave the technology away to China.

After six years and more than 15 million taxpayer dollars, a group of engineers and researchers in Seattle, Washington reportedly developed a powerful vanadium redox flow battery powerful that does not appear to degrade the way cellphone batteries or even car batteries do. The batteries stored enough energy to power a house and were capable of charging and recharging for as long as 30 years.

According to NPR, the technology was given to a Chinese company by the U.S. Department of Energy, first in 2017, as part of a sublicense, and later, in 2021, as part of a license transfer. In the last six years, China reportedly invested millions into the cutting-edge green technology, which Biden has touted as a signature issue of his administration.

When NPR pressed its investigation and sought answers, the Department of Energy said in a statement: “DOE takes America’s manufacturing obligations within its contracts extremely seriously. If DOE determines that a contractor who owns a DOE-funded patent or downstream licensee is in violation of its U.S. manufacturing obligations, DOE will explore all legal remedies.”

This kind of government incompetence results when you have greedy investors and too many career politicians in Washington, D.C., with no idea how to create jobs or with any ability to run a business, let alone the people’s government.

How can they stand idly by as our technology and jobs are being hijacked by China?

One remedy is to elect representatives who put more faith in American entrepreneurship than in a bloated government bureaucracy with strangling regulations.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.