It's no secret to Americans who have filled up their gas tanks to travel over the long Thanksgiving weekend or paid their natural gas bill as temperatures grow colder that the Biden administration's war on American energy has come at a significant cost to the American people.
Many Americans keyed in on Biden's comments earlier this month that there will be "no more drilling" in the United States, a restatement of his work to make the United States dependent on foreign oil while making Americans pay the price in a "transition" away from fossil fuels, one in which "the pain is the point" to force a switch to less reliable and more expensive alternatives.
But there's another side of President Biden and his administration's war on oil, one that plays out in dark bureaucratic hallways at the hands of unelected regulators and not on national television. Well, Republican lawmakers in the House — where they'll soon have the majority — as well as the Senate — are now calling out the Biden administration's latest attempt to use executive power to crush what remains of reliable and previously affordable American energy.
In a letter to Biden's EPA Administrator Michael Reagan, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Sen. Shelley Moore Capitol (R-WV) shine on light on the burdensome regulatory regime that Biden's goons are forcing on American energy producers that the GOP lawmakers say "could jeopardize as much as half of the United States’ refining capacity."
"This regulatory proposal, the scope of which exceeds the controversial rule finalized by the Obama EPA, will do little to nothing to improve workplace safety but instead drastically raise fuel costs—contrary to President Biden’s promise to 'use every tool' at the Administration’s disposal to lower the price of gasoline for the average American," the letter explains.
Rep. McMorris Rodgers and Sen. Capito note that the Risk Management Program (RMP) being weaponized to go after oil and gas companies "has helped industry and regulators form consensus on process safety standards and best practices, while also appropriately communicating levels of risk to the public."
"However," they continue, "EPA's recently proposed rule departs from prior practice for the RMP program, raising questions about how useful this rule will be in protecting workers and the public." That's because, the lawmakers add, "EPA's proposal adds costly, burdensome, and ineffective requirements on regulated facilities, including domestic fuel refiners that are not comparable with the alleged safety benefits."
While a lot of the letter contains bureaucratic jargon through which the Biden administration has sought to obscure the true aims of its policy and rule changes, McMorris Rodgers and Capito explain what the impact of the EPA's proposed changes would be for Americans.
"If implemented as proposed, we understand that this rule has the potential to significantly impede domestic gasoline production, impacting supply chains and increasing costs for consumers," the lawmakers write. "In other words, this rule will be directly responsible for increasing consumer prices at the pump and exacerbating America’s high inflation rate,” they add. That is, the opposite of what President Biden has said publicly about using every tool at his disposal to lower the cost of fuel for Americans.
The lawmakers' full letter can be found here.