As the White House takes a victory lap over a temporary drop in gas prices, there’s a lot Joe Biden wants you to forget.
Over the past two years, we have seen gas prices rocketing to the highest levels in American history. The White House’s response was to deplete America’s strategic reserve. Prices dipped briefly but not for long. As we enter autumn, prices are climbing again, threatening to break the previous records set a few months ago; yet Biden’s counterproductive, ideological-driven energy war continues.
Looking back on the presidential campaign of 2020, Biden vowed he would go to war with US energy production and bring it down for good. “No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry,” he said in a debate during the Democrat primaries. “No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. It ends.”
During the campaign, he suggested energy workers “learn to code” after he destroyed their jobs. He said of fossil fuel executives that “we should put them in jail.” He still wants a federal fracking ban and a carbon tax, but for now political realities will not allow them.
Other Democrats made promises on energy during the 2020 campaign, but none went as far as Biden because they understood the massive problems it would create for the US economy. But Biden kept his word and went to work on Day 1 to cripple the US energy industry.
He canceled the permit for the Keystone Pipeline, which would’ve brought oil from western Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Now that oil travels over land in trucks and on trains and is far more likely to spill and cause pollution.
He halted drilling on federal lands, slow-walked the permitting process for offshore drilling to the point that new projects have virtually stopped and has made it virtually impossible to export liquified natural gas.
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Biden also has gone to war on gas pipelines in the US. His Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has tried to institute rules requiring a greenhouse gas environmental assessment for every phase of natural gas pipelines, making them prohibitively expensive to build or operate.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., forced the administration to back down on this for now, but Richard Glick, the head of the agency, has insinuated he will try again. Much of the country depends on pipelines from energy-producing states such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania. If pipelines can’t operate, neither Biden nor any other Green Dreamers have a plausible way to heat the American people this winter.
The administration also has cheered on California’s new law that would forbid the sale of gas-powered cars in the state after 2035. In a move that should have set off alarm bells about the prudence of such an initiative, Gov. Gavin Newsom, on the same day, ordered Californians to avoid using energy during peak demand times in the afternoon and, especially, to avoid charging their electric vehicles.
Biden’s party is working to make the changes permanent by cutting off financing for energy exploration. Last week, in a congressional hearing, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., a member of The Squad of far-left extremists, asked some of the leaders of the nation’s top banks whether they would continue to fund energy exploration in the US.
None of the bank presidents said they planned to cut off funding for fossil fuels. One, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, said, “Absolutely not, and that would be the road to Hell for America,” after which Tlaib said everyone with a student loan should take their money out of his bank.
Biden has paid dearly for his commitment to these policies. His approval ratings have been underwater for over a year and are moving downward again. Inflation is six times what it was when he took office.
Gas prices are still nearly double what they were when Biden became president, and that’s after he caused them to be artificially brought down by squandering our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Biden has reduced the reserve to a 40-year low as he sells oil abroad to loosen the market, but President Trump filled the reserve with the lowest-price energy seen in the country in decades, and now it will have to be refilled with much more expensive fuel.
Pollsters agree that his party will suffer in the midterms for these policies, but even that won’t be enough to stop Biden’s efforts to destroy the domestic energy industry.
It leads to the frightening question: What will it take to get Biden to come to his senses on energy policy? How much suffering will Americans have to endure first?
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future, a non-profit that advocates for America’s energy workers. You can find him on Twitter @larrybehrens or you can email him: larry@powerthefuture.com.
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