Biden Ignores His Policy's Role in High Gas Prices; Blames Oil Companies, Putin

Mar 09, 2022

As the American people continue to have their household budget’s decimated by the costs of gasoline and fuel oil, the Biden administration has launched an egregious gaslighting campaign to deflect from their transformative and opportunistic energy policies; policies that took effect his first day in office and which have resulted in an average $3 per gallon price increase at the pump.

In the face of that indisputable fact, President Biden sent a clear message to US oil and gas companies on Tuesday that they would see no relief after banning the import of Russian oil, natural gas, and coal.

"Let me say this to the oil and gas companies and to the finance firms that back them: We understand that Putin's war against the people of Ukraine is causing prices to rise,” Biden said. “But it's no excuse to exercise excessive price increases or pad profits or any kind of effort to exploit this situation or American consumers. Russia's aggression is costing us all, and this is no time for profit-carrying or price-gouging."

Biden went on to further deflect blame onto the fossil fuel sector by pointing to the 9,000 unused federal-land drilling leases currently held by oil and gas companies.

“It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production,” Biden said. “They are not using [the 9,000 oil-drilling leases] for production now. That’s their decision.”

Biden’s statement drew immediate condemnation throughout the US oil industry with ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Lance, saying his rhetoric was a spewing of political talking points and “not very helpful.”

“[The White House] just doesn’t understand the complexity of the business,” Lance said. “We sell into the market,” spotlighting the fact that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t set the price of oil or fuel.

Industry executives explained that it’s not unusual for federal leases to sit idle, since the leased tracts may not contain enough crude to justify the cost to extract it from the ground.

While the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest short-term energy outlook projected Brent crude would average $83 per barrel in 2022 before falling to $68 per barrel in 2023, it has revised those estimates upward, to $105.22 in 2022 and $88.98 in 2023. Brent crude hit $139 per barrel Monday. Some traders are speculating oil will reach $200 a barrel during March; their speculation affects the market price of gasoline and fuel oil to the consumer.

The most recent uptick in prices may have to do with the Russia-Ukraine war in part, but prices have been increasing for over a year.

David Blackmon, the editor of SHALE Magazine, said:

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has added a premium to the price of crude on the global market of $15 to $20 per barrel and promises to add more if the conflict is extended. But the oil price was $37 per barrel when Biden was elected and had already risen by $60 before Russia’s invasion due to supply and demand factors. The fact is the market has been under-supplied for months now, and Biden has contributed to that greatly by his efforts to hamstring the US oil industry. That’s the truth.”

Shubham Garg, CEO of White Tundra Investments, said:

“The geopolitical risk and fear in the market do play a role. However, I think the bigger problem is a fundamental problem – we were already in an undersupplied market with a very low inventory. “American domestic production and Canadian production have been unfairly targeted.”

Karr Ingham, a petroleum economist with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, agreed with EIA administrators in pointing out that the Biden administration’s transformative, agenda-driven yet inept recovery from the COVID production downturn accounted for the long-range rise in prices.

“The question is, why weren’t we growing production on the heels of that much faster than we were?” Ingham asked. “I think it’s quite safe to say that the political, legislative, and regulatory environment is openly hostile, or has been, to growing or re-establishing US domestic crude oil production. It’s quite disingenuous to simply blame our current price levels on what Russia did because we had a $90 base of crude oil pricing in place before this happened.”

Why This Is Important

To deny that the Biden administration's energy policies have been anything but damaging to the fossil fuel industry is to exist in denial of a truth that is presented right in front of your eyes. The shutting down of the Keystone XL and the Line 5 pipelines, the ban on drilling in ANWAR, and the termination of the 80 million-acre oil lease in Louisiana, have all served as foundational points in the kneejerk spike in gas prices.

Gasoline prices on this date in 2021 stood at $2.77 per gallon on average. Today they stand at an average of $4.17 per gallon with reports of prices over $6.00 per gallon in California.

The price of a gallon of gas on January 20, 2021 – the day Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States, according to GasBuddy.com: $2.25 per gallon.

The US Energy Information Administration reported:

“As we head into the winter of 2021-22, retail prices for energy are at or near multiyear highs in the United States...we expect the increase in energy prices as the United States returns to economic growth to mean higher residential energy bills this winter...”

They went on to predict that for the 2021-2022 winter:

The nearly half of US households that heat primarily with natural gas will spend 30% more than they spent last winter on average
The 41% of US households that heat primarily with electricity will spend 6% more
The 5% of US households that heat primarily with propane will spend 54% more
The 4% of US households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend 43% more

That wasn’t because of a virus and it wasn’t because of the Russians invading Ukraine. It was because the Biden administration entered office with a grotesque and radical agenda to cripple the fossil fuel industry to such an extent that prices would rise to allow the green energy sphere to be competitive in the marketplace.

The Institute of Energy Research defines energy independence as producing more energy than a nation uses. The United States achieved that goal in 2019 after a 62-year run in being import-dependent for our energy needs. Our country achieved this independence by increasing the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. This resulted in an increase of 5.7 percent in total energy produced while demand decreased by 0.9 percent.

Another milestone achieved in 2019 is that the United States became a net exporter of energy, the third-largest energy exporter in the world, helping to drive down fuel prices while creating 10 million jobs, domestically, in the energy sector.

That all ended when the Biden team decided to inflict the ideological agenda of transforming the United States from a fossil fuel energy culture to a renewable energy culture, which they did within the first hour of the administration.

As an aside, the fossil fuel sector accounts for the overwhelming majority of energy production and consumption, not only in the United States but also in the world. And even though renewable energy has been actively promoted since 1957, its share of the energy consumption market has only grown by four percentage points since then. This is an anemic percentage given the billions – if not trillions – of taxpayer dollars the government has spent on subsidies to the industry.

I don’t believe I know anyone who wants to live in a polluted world. I know of no human being who would prefer polluted air and water to clean air and water. I know of no one who thinks harming the Earth is a good or wise thing. That said, I know of no thinking, learned human being who doesn’t understand that the Earth is much more powerful than the human race. It shook off the dinosaurs, cycled through ice ages and volcanic eras, and continues on no matter what. It repairs itself after manmade nuclear events, self-vaccinates against manmade contagions, and will survive mankind in its entirety.

To believe that humans have the ability to destroy the Earth beyond repair is a grand exercise in arrogance.

I am all for embracing renewable energy when that technology eclipses fossil fuels as a more reliable, more efficient, and more affordable energy source. Only a fool wouldn’t. But dismantling an efficient, reliable, and – when activism and government stay out of the way – affordable energy source to pursue a “not ready for prime time” energy source that has been proven to fail in a crisis (Texas), partially relies on fossil fuels to operate (EV charging), and that costs dramatically more simply to satisfy an activist movement is, in a word, stupid.

There is no reason – no good reason – that the fossil fuel industry and the renewable energy sector cannot work together to deliver reliable, stable, effective, and affordable energy to the United States and the world. Truthfully, it would marginalize some very bad actors on the world stage who have harnessed energy as a tool of influence and power.

This brings us to one ultimate question. What is the motivation behind the fascist-Left’s insistence that we embrace renewable energy before its time when its use has only grown 4 percent since the 1950s? I’ll give you one guess...(cough)...World Economic Forum...(cough)...Great Reset.

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