Here’s a question for President Biden: “Mr. President, will you do everything in your regulatory power to make it easier for American companies to produce more oil and gas to make the U.S. and its allies in Europe and elsewhere less dependent on Russian energy?” That question was posed to the president by the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday, and I’d like to hear his response as gas prices approach $5 per gallon here in Carson City.
“The question is straightforward, and the goal is to elicit a straight answer that gets to the heart of the current geopolitical moment,” the Journal added. But straight answers are in short supply at the White House, where Biden and his enablers blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for inflation and high gas prices. “Hashtag# PutinPriceHikes,” they tell us, but we know better.
“Even as President Biden begs OPEC to pump more oil, Democrats are threatening to punish U.S. oil companies with a windfall profits tax if they increase production,” the Journal continued. “The contradiction nicely summarizes progressive energy policy,” which keeps gas prices high.
That policy is at the heart of Biden’s war on fossil fuels led by his insufferable field commander, Climate Czar John Kerry, a failed presidential candidate and mediocre Secretary of State. Kerry flies around the world in his greenhouse gas-spewing private jet looking for agreements to sign with America’s friends and enemies. He says he’s saving the planet, but his main goal is photo ops with foreign dignitaries depicting him as a climate hero. Remember, this is the same “hero” who threw his Vietnam medals over a wall.
As long as Biden marches to the tune of people like Kerry, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York City socialist, we’ll continue to pay high prices at local gas stations, and Biden will continue to beg enemies like Iran and Venezuela to sell us more oil while we should be producing our own oil.
In a recent column, Harold Hamm, chairman of the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, lambasted “President Biden’s unwillingness to reverse course on his administration’s commitment to put the American oil and gas industry out of business at the consumer’s expense. … The American energy industry is willing to help if Washington stops trying to put us out of business.”
Another Wall Street Journal columnist, Latin America expert Mary Anastasia O’Grady, blasted Biden’s apparent willingness to do business with brutal Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. “You’d think that ‘woke’ American corporations and Wall Street would be embarrassed to be seen doing business with gangsters propped up by Russia, China, Cuba and Iran,” she wrote, and I agree 100%.
Venezuela released two jailed American businessmen while U.S. officials were trying to negotiate an oil deal with dictator Maduro, which looks like an ugly hostages-for-oil ploy. Such a deal would only encourage other undemocratic countries to grab more Americans as bargaining chips.
Meanwhile, a fierce energy policy debate played out in Washington over Biden’s nomination of “progressive” Sarah Bloom Raskin, a sharp critic of the U.S. energy industry, as the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator. After Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) announced that he would oppose Raskin, she withdrew last Wednesday from consideration for the key regulatory post. Manchin emphasized the need for a comprehensive policy “to meet our nation’s critical energy needs.” Just call me a Joe Manchin Democrat.
Biden blames Putin for high gas and oil prices, but we blame our president for signing-on to the one-sided Green New Deal and canceling the Keystone pipeline. Drill baby, drill! Drill for Ukraine.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.
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