Even as President Joe Biden blames others for today’s outrageously high energy prices, he continues his jihad against domestic fossil fuel production. As Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) put it, Biden’s policies are “just awful.”
Last week, Biden canceled two planned oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. His administration also gave clear signals that it will allow the nationwide, five-year offshore drilling program to lapse in June without a legally mandated replacement plan anywhere near readiness. This would be a terrible dereliction of a legal duty in any circumstances, but in a time when the national average for a gallon of gasoline is nearing $4.50, it also is economic malpractice for both short-term and long-term national needs.
“Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern,” Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “The administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it.”
Biden defenders say that lease sales now would not lead to actual production for several years and thus that they are irrelevant to today’s prices. They are both wrong and ridiculous. As in all industries, today’s energy prices reflect long-term expectations. If the five-year plan isn’t renewed on time, the American Petroleum Institute estimates that the result could be a 500,000 barrel production shortfall per day for years.
The administration’s first excuse is that the leases and the plan are being held up anyway because of court battles. Well, guess who is waging the court battles? The Biden administration, of course. If Biden doesn’t want court fights to slow down the leasing programs, all he needs to do is stop battling in court against lease sales. He repeatedly has lost in preliminary court battles on the issue because his previous war against domestic leasing is itself contrary to the clear language of the law.
Furthermore, the administration’s position that such court fights are needed to ward off climate change is, as Manchin said, “a very lame excuse.” Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute calculates that the total possible effect of the now-canceled lease sales would be a 0.00023 degrees Celsius increase by the year 2100. Mount Everest, meet the first grain in a molehill.
The administration’s second excuse is that the industry hasn’t made all existing leases operational and hasn’t obviously champed at the bit for the three just-canceled ones. Again, this is absurd. Legal uncertainty and all sorts of technical factors make some leases more worth exploiting, and sooner, than others. Furthermore, industry executives are famously cagey about their interest so as not to start bidding up lease prices too soon and too high. Once the bidding actually begins, the bidding companies usually emerge in force.
In the long run, the administration’s antagonism to domestic production will harm energy independence, keep prices high, and cost many thousands of jobs plus billions of dollars in revenues both to the federal government and to state and local jurisdictions. That’s a lot of harm to endure for the sake of posturing about astonishingly negligible effects upon potential climate change.
