Joe Biden is the kind of man who deliberately would steer his car into a ditch, crawl from the wreckage and then probe the ditch for criminal conduct.
Such nonsense mirrors Biden’s recent instructions to the Federal Trade Commission. Citing “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies,” the president told the FTC to “bring all of the Commission’s tools to bear if you uncover any wrongdoing.”
Is Biden cynical enough to blame Big Oil for a national fiasco that he concocted? Or is he so touchingly self-unaware that he misses the connection between higher pump prices and his own war on oil?
In June 2007, Biden shared with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer his plan to cut gasoline costs: “As president of the United States, use the Justice Department to go in and investigate this whole issue of price-gouging.”
When Biden uttered such baseless paranoia in September, the Associated Press put him in his place. “THE FACTS: There actually is little evidence something nefarious is behind the higher gasoline prices, as Biden suggests.”
It takes profound naïveté for Biden not to recognize how his and his team’s anti-oil animus has driven fuel costs skyward. In fewer than 11 months, this administration has:
- Killed the Keystone XL pipeline.
- Threatened to plug the Canada-to-Michigan Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.
- Halted oil leases in a sliver of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
- Stopped oil and gas leases on federal lands.
- Proposed a methane tax that could cost this industry up to $10 billion annually.
- Encouraged left-wing activists to pressure financiers to defund oil companies.
And how is this multifront war on oil working out? As predicted.
In October, US oil drilling had plunged 38 percent versus October 2019, before COVID-19 derailed the booming Trump-GOP economy. With supply down and demand up (as COVID-related instability has eased), regular unleaded gasoline retailed on Oct. 25 for $3.38 per gallon compared with $2.59 on Oct. 28, 2019 — up 30.5 percent. On those dates, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s price for West Texas Intermediate crude was $83.94 per barrel, versus $56.65 — up 48.2 percent. Likewise, natural-gas drilling had slid 28.9 percent while prices were $5.90 per million BTUs vs. $2.45 — up 140.8 percent.
Team Biden’s sadism toward its fellow Americans exposes the thuggish side of its anti-oil fanaticism.
- Biden himself told New Hampshire voters in September 2019: “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuels.”
- Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, while Michigan’s governor, said in November 2016, “We ought to be doing everything we possibly can to keep fossil fuel energy in the ground.”
- Saule Omarova — Biden’s Kazakh-born, Soviet-educated, Brezhnev-flavored nominee for comptroller of the currency — spoke in February about fossil-fuel companies: “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.”
Given the religious fervor that informs Team Biden’s hatred of oil, its actions are utterly incoherent. To escape the political Hell of what they consider high-gas-price Heaven, Biden begs OPEC and the Kremlin to increase oil output. This is like the Anti-Saloon League beseeching Scotland to boost whisky production after Prohibition shuttered US distilleries.
Relying on the Middle East and Moscow for energy also undermines Biden’s environmental objectives. At the margin, Biden’s approach would generate more carbon dioxide. North American crude cleanly crosses US territory (and, to a degree, the Canadian border) via carbon-neutral pipelines. Conversely, Arab and Russian oil must traverse oceans and approach US ports on fuel-burning, emissions-generating supertankers.
Like American reserves, OPEC’s and Russia’s oil also produces CO2 when consumed, but with the added disadvantage of destroyed American jobs. By killing Keystone on his first day as president, Biden obliterated 1,000 unionized positions, some 10,000 future jobs and $2.2 billion in wages.
The president should pause his self-combusting, ecologically contradictory war on oil long enough to isolate the root cause of high energy prices.
Hint: He’s married to Dr. Jill Biden.