It’s ironic that the best summation of President Joe Biden’s energy policy is a joke from former Vice President Al Gore, who used to goad conservatives by saying, “The right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.”
Biden’s astonishingly awkward struggle to suppress soaring gas prices, and the electoral danger they pose to Democrats, brings the green-extremist veep’s labored humor instantly to mind. The president’s left hand seems utterly clueless about the mischief his far-left hand is getting up to.
As Katie Tubb writes in the Washington Examiner magazine’s cover story this week, the administration repeatedly contradicts itself, undoing with one policy what it seems to attempt with another.
It tells Wall Street to invest in oil companies but changes the rules to make investment unattractive. It helps climate warriors tie up energy companies in court battles and pushes “policies that frustrate future oil, coal, and natural gas exploration, production, distribution, and investment, even as it saps taxpayers to boost subsidies for renewable energy.”
While the far-left hand is doing this and much more, the more sensible left hand, panicked about burning its fingers in the November congressional midterm elections, pleads with OPEC to pump more crude, begs Venezuela for increased supplies, and releases a record 180 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The latest of these moves amounts to 5% of daily U.S. consumption and will probably have a marginal impact on the international market for crude. But whether it pushes downstream prices lower is unknowable.
The more fundamental question for Biden as he tangles himself inextricably in the coils of the gasoline hose is, however, why oil from the SPR, from Marxist Venezuela, or from the assortment of allies and enemies that make up OPEC should be thought preferable to oil lying under our feet in American soil. Domestic exploration and production would be long-term rather than a stopgap, would strengthen America and weaken its enemies, would generate well-paid American jobs, and would be extracted under the cleanest environmental regulation book in the world.
If you’re really concerned about clean energy and climate change, why export output, money, and jobs to dirtier and often hostile producers? Could it be that the left hand actually knows exactly what the far-left hand is doing, but the two must flap independently rather than act in unison so, with a lot more luck than judgment, centrist voters will be persuaded that Biden and the Democrats are really trying to ease price pain, but the left-wing base will see that its champion in the Oval Office is keeping his 2019 campaign “guarantee” to “end fossil fuel”?
Separately, I want to welcome Dominic Green as a columnist for both the magazine and our Restoring America project. Dominic, a historian, critic, and former editor-in-chief of the Spectator, is a wonderful and entertaining writer. In his first column, he skewers the woke transformation of Disney. “The Mouse follows the money,” he notes, reserving “sex-positive virtue signals for the domestic market” while seeing no evil in communist persecution.
