Washington, D.C. – The impact Biden policies have had driving prices up is felt nowhere as acutely as in the traditional energy sector. What the president has proposed and the Democrats who control Congress have helped him enact have driven the price of gasoline up fueling a return to Jimmy Carter-like inflation and reducing confidence in the American economy.
None of that may be accidental. Biden came into office promising to help wean the United States off what proponents of green energy alternatives have called its addiction to fossil fuels. It has been argued he had the support of the American people who, the polls show, support the idea that energy coming from so-called renewable sources like wind and solar should comprise a higher percentage of the national energy mix.
What those polls and other surveys also say, and which goes underreported, is that they're not willing to pay very much to do it. They're happy if it happens, but only on the cheap. This means the politicians who've staked their careers on making the country “go green” may soon be in for a rude awakening.
Under Barack Obama, who also pushed hard to incorporate wind and solar into the national fuel supply, it was on the infrastructure side. There were plenty of companies who benefited from the loan guarantees and subsidies he pushed through Congress but, in the end, there wasn't much to show for it except for an expensive bailout. Remember Solyndra?
Biden has stepped things up. He, like Obama, is subsidizing the creation of a green infrastructure – which wouldn't be necessary if the technologies involved were ready for commercialization. The markets would take care of that. But he's also using his regulatory authority to force energy companies to cut back on the production of fossil fuels here in the U.S.
That's what pushed the price of gasoline higher than it's been in years. It wasn't the war Russia is waging on Ukraine and it wasn't for lack of supply able to be exported from countries like Saudi Arabia. Biden's policies reduced domestic supply while the recovery from the pandemic lockdowns – which has been so anemic it can only barely be called that – has pushed demand up.
Things have gotten so bad the president has been reduced to begging the Saudis and others to increase their output – a request to which they've not only thumbed their noses but have committed to reducing production by a significant amount.
Biden and company pretend this is not the case, and brag that the price of gasoline is now coming down. True, it is, but from the high point it hit after his policies drove it up. It's still much higher than it was when he was sworn in. You would think something so basic would be obvious to them. It's not. Then again, the Energy Secretary, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, says straight-facedly that production is up because the president has released fuel from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve into the marketplace.
The price we're paying for his policies is astounding. A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report released Monday finds that Biden's energy policies are costing the U.S. $100 billion in lost output each year.
Economists Casey Mulligan and Stephen Moore, the authors of the report, say that, according to their estimates, had the U.S. kept the energy policies of the previous administration in place, “daily U.S. oil production would be 2-3 million barrels higher, and daily gas production 20-30 billion cubic feet greater.”
According to them, both of whom advised the Trump White House on economic policy, the United States would have remained the world's leading producer of energy, probably maintained its status as a net energy exporter, and “would not have to import a single net barrel of oil from abroad” because, Mulligan and Moore conclude, “The U.S. would be producing as much as $300 million more oil output per day.'
The report takes aim at specific Biden policies including impeding the construction of new energy pipelines or canceling them altogether, the reduction of drilling on public lands and tough new environmental regulations that, they say “raise the cost of drilling” as driving the increase in the price of oil and natural gas by reducing the supply.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican in line to chair the Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment should her party win a majority in the upcoming November election, appears to agree with Mulligan and Moore's conclusion. In an interview, she told The Daily Mail the Biden administration was to blame because it wasted “more than a year and a half” doing things besides preparing for a tightening in the global energy market.
‘Instead of approving key projects and reforming the broken processes that hold them back, the administration has sold unprecedented volumes from our emergency oil reserves,' she told the paper. Meanwhile, the president and others in his administration continue to blame the energy industry, accusing it of gouging consumers by keeping the price at the pump artificially high.
U.S. energy companies should, White House advisors said Jake Sullivan and Brian Deese said in a joint statement, “keep bringing pump prices down by closing the historically large gap between wholesale and retail gas prices – so that American consumers are paying less at the pump.”
What Sullivan and Deese assert, and which echoes Biden's repeated calls on the campaign trail for the energy sector to bring down the price of gasoline – which some interpret as a threat to impose price controls or to order damaging, costly investigations of corporate behavior by the Justice Department if the nation's energy producers refuse to comply. It also is only half of the story.
The president and his advisers didn't make it clear to the American people what the cost of the transition away from fossil fuels would be. Perhaps deliberately, they also didn't make it clear how much we'd all have to pay to make green energy a bigger part of the mix.
Now that the Inflation Reduction Act, which was loaded with green energy provisions is safely through Congress and now law – unlike the permitting process revisions West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was promised in exchange for his vote in favor of the IRA – progressives have started to share their estimates of what it all will really cost.
“The widely cited figure for how much the Inflation Reduction Act will spend to fight climate change—$374 billion—is in large part determined by the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of how much the green energy tax credits will get used,” says a new analysis appearing in the October edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
“That estimate,” the magazine says, “is wrong.” Citing an analysis from Credit Suisse Bank, the magazine projects that “So many people and businesses will use those tax credits that the IRA's total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the CBO projects.”
From top to bottom and from pillar to post, Biden's energy policies are making people poorer and the nation weaker. And, thanks to him, there will be a raft of new companies rising in the energy sector that will be producing less with more investments by taxpayers. Meaning they've got it backward again. When Biden talked about “Build Back Better” we should have guessed he meant the seventies.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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I have only thing to say to this fake president.
F U biden
That is where he has been headed all along. He is a trader to the United States. He is selling us off to the communist countries and to all of our enemies.
Open UP OUR oil lines Now