In his Thursday remarks on gas prices that hit their all-time high earlier in March, President Biden singled out oil and gas companies in another attack on their industry before he denied any responsibility for skyrocketing fuel prices and announced measures he claimed will help Americans feeling pain at the pump.
The root cause of high fuel prices are due to two things, according to President Biden: the pandemic and Vladimir Putin. No mention of his administration's policies — enumerated by Townhall here — that caused fuel costs to rise since Biden's first day in office when he started killing off American energy projects.
BIDEN: "The problem we're facing with gas prices has two roots. First, the pandemic...the second root is Vladimir Putin." pic.twitter.com/Xcjc5SxtL0
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 31, 2022
Biden continued demonizing oil and gas companies and accusing them of prioritizing profits over the American people — sort of like how Biden has prioritized the radical climate alarmist agenda over the America people. Biden also said it was an opportunity for "patriotism" for oil and gas companies to produce more oil and forego profits, again failing to mention that his administration spent the last 15 months seeking to starve those companies of capital while slow-walking their permits to begin producing more oil.
Joe Biden says that there's "nothing standing in their way" when discussing oil companies increasing domestic energy production. pic.twitter.com/PBwsfhwLc3
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 31, 2022
To respond to the inflation and energy crisis that's come under his tenure, Biden announced two steps he'd be taking.
First, he'll be tapping into American's Strategic Petroleum Reserve — plans Townhall reported here earlier and one that experts say is unlikely to have the intended effect — to the tune of one million barrels per day for six months, a timeline that conveniently leads from now until just before November's midterm elections.
BIDEN: "Ultimately, we and the whole world need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels altogether." pic.twitter.com/AFgRvYhPJi
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 31, 2022
Second, as part of what Biden described as "declaring real American energy independence in the long term" — something the United States had when Biden took office but has since been destroyed — Biden will be using the Defense Production Act in order to push America toward electric vehicles. A release from the White House explains that the Biden administration will use the DPA for "ensuring a robust, resilient, sustainable, and environmentally responsible domestic industrial base to meet the requirements of the clean energy economy, such as the production of large-capacity batteries...for the automotive, e-mobility, and stationary storage sectors."
The White House also refers to the "clean energy transition" in its release, something Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm mentioned earlier this year as being responsible for rising gas prices, a contradiction of Biden's claim that rising prices were only to blame on Putin and greedy oil and gas companies.
Both the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and Defense Production Act were created with the intention of being used in times of national emergencies presumably not caused by the President of the United States. Foreign wars, natural disasters, and global health emergencies were the intended cases in which such resources would be used by presidents. In Biden's case though, they're being used to respond to something his administration caused, smack of political convenience heading into the midterms, and are being used to further force the United States away from oil and gas as a source of energy. If the United States is in a "wartime," as Biden said Thursday, it's a war on American oil and gas that his administration started.