By Steve Milloy for RealClearPolitics
President Biden is driving fossil fuel-powered America into a wall so that he can replace it with a “green energy”-powered America. The Biden administration euphemizes this as a “transition.” It is not. It’s just a collision that will result in America being totaled.
Since Joe Biden became president, he has done everything in his power to de-power America. On Day 1, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, halted new oil and gas drilling on public lands, and rejoined the Paris climate agreement, which commits America to cutting our greenhouse gas emissions but not China’s.
Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency reinstated Obama-era rules to make it more expensive to produce oil and gas, issued rules to make internal combustion engine-powered cars more expensive, and gave “green” California the unprecedented (and probably unconstitutional) authority to dictate what kind of cars all Americans can drive.
Biden has empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with the authority to block new oil and gas pipelines on the basis of climate concerns, and is continuing to halt new oil and gas drilling on federal lands in defiance of a federal court order.
These and many other anti-fossil fuel actions have raised gasoline prices roughly one dollar per gallon since Biden took office. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, exacerbating an ongoing global energy crisis (worsened by European climate policies). Gasoline prices have increased another 60 cents since the Ukraine invasion, and are not likely to stop rising any time soon.
Normally in response to such an energy crisis, a U.S. president might at least temporarily put aside an unpopular political agenda to ease supply issues and alleviate pain at the pump. Not Joe Biden. He is doing anything but that.
Biden first announced during his State of the Union address that he and other allied nations were going to release 60 million barrels of oil from national strategic petroleum reserves around the world, including 30 million from the United States.
While that sounds like a lot, it isn’t. Given that the world burns about 100 million barrels of oil per day, it’s hard to see how a 15-hour supply of oil is going to accomplish anything other than fooling people who don’t know any better.
Instead of encouraging the American oil and gas industry to produce more gasoline – remember that the U.S. essentially controlled global oil prices under President Trump’s “America First” policies – Biden has gone hat in hand to despotic regimes in Iran and Venezuela, and to the unreliable governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates asking them to produce more oil.
Faced with the problematic politics of skyrocketing gas prices in a midterm election year, the president is desperately lashing out. He has falsely accused the U.S. oil industry of profiteering. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has incorrectly blamed the oil industry for failing to utilize existing leases on federal lands to produce more oil. Biden is even trying to point the finger at Vladimir Putin by promoting the Twitter hashtag #PutinPriceHike.
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The reason for not embracing the normal and reasonable solution to the current situation – allowing the U.S. oil and gas industry to produce as much as possible, as soon as possible – is that the Biden administration intends to use the gasoline crisis to advance its elitist climate agenda.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, for example, are touting electric cars (average price $56,000) as the solution to rising gas prices. Biden’s green supporters are advocating more wind and solar as the solution to the ongoing energy crisis because, well, “never waste a crisis.” Adding insult to injury, John Kerry said he hoped, despite the invasion of Ukraine, that Putin would keep his eye on the climate ball.
The result? Americans are made to suffer unnecessarily and national security is imperiled, all for an agenda that is junk science-fueled and impractical, regardless of how you feel about United Nations’ “climate science.” This is not rational policy. It is intentional nation-wrecking.
Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.