It’s impossible to exaggerate President Joe Biden’s fecklessness on energy policy. Incredibly, it’s only grown worse in the wake of the Ukraine war.
On Tuesday, Biden rushed to declare a US embargo on buying Russian oil — clearly not out of any considered policy decision, but simply because Democrats in Congress joined Republicans in pushing the idea.
The move has risks, such as pushing an increasingly erratic Vladimir Putin to stop all Russia’s energy sales to the West, which would send global prices soaring even further.
Worse, the Bidenites are now looking to replace Russian oil with Venezuelan crude — no matter that that nation’s dictatorship is as evil as Putin’s. And they’re rushing to a new Iran deal, empowering that vile regime in hopes of getting Tehran’s oil back on the global market.
Meanwhile, the White House is pretending that Putin’s war is the only cause of the crisis, ignoring the fact that energy prices started soaring as soon as Biden took office and declared war on the US fossil-fuel industry: shutting down pipelines, denying new drilling permits and promising a renewed regulatory and tax attack on any who dare to drill.
Team Biden and Democrats like New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul are also frowning on suggestions to suspend taxes on gasoline, home-heating oil and the like — though federal, state and local levies accounted for 22% of pump prices pre-war.
In other words, a nationwide suspension of gas taxes would do a whole lot more for hard-hit consumers than Biden’s farcical release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: Even with other nations joining in, that’s less than two days’ global supply, offering a best brief relief.
Democrats inevitably say that unleashing US drillers won’t have an immediate impact. That’s only partly true, since markets respond fast to a changing outlook. Plus, many companies know where they’d like to move next, and would move rapidly if they believed the target was off their back.
More important, it would definitely boost US supply (and exports to our allies) within months — while this energy shock could well be long-lasting.
It doesn’t matter where the fossil fuels we burn come from when it comes to climate change, and the simple fact is that wind and solar aren’t even growing fast enough to meet rising global demand. (For that matter, the US fossil-fuel industry is a lot cleaner than Russia’s, Venezuela’s or Iran’s. And while more nuclear plants could help, they take years to build.)
So it’s utter madness to empower America’s enemies — civilization’s enemies — by refusing to exploit our own resources out of some dim idea that it brings the world closer to a carbon-free future.
And it’s beyond vile for Biden to pretend it’s all Putin’s fault, hoping the American people are too dim to notice their own costs started soaring long before the invasion of Ukraine.
How far do the president’s polls have to sink before the White House starts facing reality, and stop pretending it can spin away the disasters it keeps producing?
