President Joe Biden’s administration began with attacks on the fossil fuel industry. Among his first acts in office were the cancellation of a key pipeline and a halt to new federal drilling leases. Yet today, oil production in the United States is on the rise. The main reason is that gasoline prices have spiked to such crazy high levels. There is money to be made, and supply is surging to meet demand.
American producers could be making more of that money too. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s utterly incoherent energy policy is holding down domestic production while making the nation and Biden himself look foolish.
Biden is an unmitigated embarrassment when it comes to energy. Since taking office, he has repeatedly and obsequiously prostrated himself, begging every tinpot dictator and theocrat anywhere else in the world to make more oil — just so long as it isn’t made by people in the U.S. He has begged OPEC for more production even as he retards production at home.
Even worse, Biden is now jumping on board with a gimmicky election-year plan for a federal gas tax holiday through the end of 2022. He thinks 18.4 cents a gallon is enough to buy off swing voters in spite of his administration’s appalling performance so far.
Sure, this gas tax gimmick might save you up to $3 every time you fill up your car, but a gas tax holiday cuts into the funding that is supposed to be going toward infrastructure. Biden could reduce gas prices by even more than that without sacrificing the revenue if he would only let American producers do their thing. He would also ensure that all that oil wealth was going to American producers and workers instead of Iran’s terrorist paramilitary groups or Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine. But no, Biden is endorsing Democrats’ tacit anti-science belief that oil produced in the U.S. has more carbon dioxide in it than oil from other places.
In short, Biden is trying to have it both ways, even though he knows better. His energy policy is so directionless.
This is not how Biden would act if he were motivated by some sincere but misguided concern for climate change. In that case, as any anti-car environmentalist can explain, he would be welcoming high gas prices as a deterrent to driving or as an inducement for consumers to dig deeper into their pockets and purchase electric vehicles. Instead, Biden evidently wants energy prices to be high enough to change how people behave — as long as that new behavior doesn’t include voting Republican.
If Biden really thinks he can placate angry motorists with a bit of loose change, he is in for a very rude awakening this fall. His embarrassing behavior cries out for a return to a public-spirited energy policy that keeps a cheap and abundant domestic source of energy as available as possible — a policy intended to benefit all citizens’ standard of living, not just to salvage left-wing Democrats’ fading political fortunes.
