One of the principal arguments people made when voting for President
Joe Biden
was that he was a seasoned foreign policy professional (the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no less) and he would command the world stage, protect American interests, and repair relationships with our allies. That argument largely disappeared after the Afghanistan debacle in August 2021, and it breathed its last breath earlier this month when OPEC+, at the urging of the Saudis, voted to reduce oil production by 2 million barrels per day.
Biden angered the Saudis, then he attempted to woo them, and now he is threatening them again for refusing to help Democrats pull off an election-year stunt, with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanding that Congress “immediately freeze all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including any arms sales and security cooperation beyond what is absolutely necessary to defend U.S. personnel and interests.”
Thanks to his
Green New Deal
-esque policies, Biden has surrendered America’s leadership on energy. So Saudi Arabia, not to mention a few of our enemies such as Venezuela and Iran, now has leverage over the United States.
WORLD IS EXPERIENCING ‘FIRST TRULY GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS,’ IEA DIRECTOR SAYS
What have the Democrats done in response? They’ve extended olive branches to the
Iranian regime
, the leading sponsor of Islamic terrorism, and to Venezuela, which is exporting communism in our hemisphere, while threatening our ally, the Saudis, with limited cooperation.
Biden has also decided to sell off a portion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is there to protect Americans when there are severe supply shortages caused by war or disaster. It’s now at its lowest level in 40 years thanks to Biden, who has had to compensate for his horrible energy policies and keep gas prices low to help the Democrats win in November. Asking for election help from a foreign government in exchange for favors and using U.S. assets to help his party win elections? Presidents have been impeached for less.
Oil markets see the folly of this strategy, so prices are on their way back up.
Rising gas prices mean rising costs for families and virtually every business. And the more businesses have to pay, the more customers have to pay as well — which is a big reason inflation is nearly six times what it was when Biden took office.
At the very least, you would think the Biden administration would hold off on some of the regulations limiting domestic energy production. You would be wrong.
Just as OPEC+ announced its cutback in production, Biden’s Department of the Interior announced it is considering a plan to ban all new offshore oil and gas drilling in the U.S. It is already dragging its feet on offshore permit decisions after a federal judge in Louisiana blocked officials from using new, higher estimates of cost damages from global warming.
And last winter, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates pipelines, proposed a new regulation change requiring pipeline companies to file Environmental Impact Statements all along the paths of their pipelines — the cost and complexity of which would’ve forced pipeline companies out of business.
This caught the eye of Sen.
Joe Manchin
(
D-WV
), whose state is transversed by a number of pipelines that carry natural gas to the Northeast. He convinced the administration to hold off on this crippling regulation, but the agency’s chairman, Richard Glick, seems intent on bringing it back.
But none of this should come as a surprise. Biden warned us on the campaign trail that he would end domestic energy production, and he’s proving that’s a promise he intends to keep. He’s warned we must go through a “transition” to create a better, greener future, that transitions are tough and expensive, and that we’ll just have to endure it.
The problem is we’re transitioning away from reasonably priced and reliable energy sources to green technologies that simply can’t meet our needs. We have abundant energy sources and clean ways to extract it and bring it to market. Indeed, the environmental standards of our energy industry are the most rigorous in the world, so why are we begging the biggest environmental polluters, such as Venezuela and Iran, to produce more when we could do it ourselves?
California’s
blackouts provide a window into our future if we continue this course. We have almost unlimited access to energy. We know how to get it. But Biden is preventing us from using it, except when he wants to drain our oil reserves stored for national emergencies just before an election.
Our next president better have a very different Day 1 on energy policy than this one. The country depends on it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mr. Rick Santorum is a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.
