OPINION:
Over the next few months, Team Biden will try to convince us that the answer to rising energy prices is to accelerate the rush toward alternative sources of energy — wind and solar — that we don’t and can’t control and batteries, the production of which is controlled by a genocidal regime — communist China currently holds about 80% of the materials needed to make batteries — featuring slavery and international hooliganism.
As part of this aggressive gaslighting, they will claim with completely straight faces that they have always been among the most energetic advocates for the production of affordable and reliable oil, gasoline and natural gas.
These propaganda efforts will fail because they are contrary to the facts at hand.
From the start, this administration has been clear about its hostility toward oil and gas, specifically American-produced oil and gas. During the 2020 campaign, candidate Joseph R. Biden repeatedly made it clear that he would not lease federal lands for the development of oil and natural gas and that his administration would stop the production of fossil fuels. He was crystalline: “No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. It ends.”
President Biden has been as good as his word. He has pursued a steady course of actions designed to make oil and natural gas more expensive. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. He set a goal of outlawing the sale of gasoline-powered cars within a few years. He has weaponized financial regulators against energy producers. He has suspended new leases to produce oil and gas on federal lands.
In the last three months, he has made it more difficult to issue permits for pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals and has imposed a mandate on automakers that will increase the average price of new vehicles by $1,000 (vehicles such as crossovers and SUVs will see greater increases) and create an electric vehicle mandate.
As recently as last week, Mr. Biden’s press secretary and the director of his National Economic Council both said that the most efficacious solution to high energy prices is to accelerate the deployment of alternative energy.
It is not surprising then that the price of oil has steadily increased during the Biden administration. On Jan. 20, 2021, crude traded for about $53 per barrel. On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, it traded for more than $99.
Team Biden loves to talk about the 9,000 leases that oil and gas companies possess on which production has not started. It is probably important to note that the oil and gas companies are working on more than 37,000 leases in total; they are already producing oil and natural gas on about 75% of all the federal leases they hold.
The ones that are not producing are, in many cases, because the federal government has not issued the relevant permits; the administration is sitting on more than 4,500 permit applications at the moment. It is also important to remember that a tiny percentage — about 2% — of the acreage under federal stewardship is actually available for energy production.
The Biden crew likes to say that the United States can’t drill our way to lower oil prices. But apparently, others can. For the last few months, Mr. Biden has been making the rounds to places like Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and even Russia, asking them to produce more oil — essentially to drill their way to lower prices.
The lesson is clear: American oil and gas production is bad; foreign oil and gas production is good. Team Biden wants to kneecap American production because they know that robust American production exposes the energy “transition” as the scam that it is.
Not being able to drill our way to lower prices is the exact same nonsense that former President Barack Obama used to offer up before the revolution in precision drilling and well stimulation led to the greatest energy boom in the history of the world.
The story in energy over the last few years is not about alternative energy sources like wind and solar. It is about the new oil and natural gas we have developed in places such as Pennsylvania and Texas. In the last 15 years, precision drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have produced about 10 times more energy in the United States than wind turbines and solar panels.
We can produce much more and affect the global price of oil and natural gas, but only if the federal government stops suppressing investment and production. A competent government would seek to make sure that our nation’s resources are brought to bear at this moment. Unfortunately, our current government is dedicated to making sure that investing in and producing oil and gas is difficult, if not impossible.
Team Biden is counting on short memories and careless attention to facts. That is probably its best chance to avoid the reckonings — electoral and otherwise — that are heading its way.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the co-host of “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.
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