Dan O’Donnell reports on just how badly President Biden has mismanaged America’s energy crisis.
Oct. 7, 2022
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
“Nobody f***s with a Biden,” President Biden boasted to the Mayor of Fort Myers in a now-viral hot mic moment on Wednesday.
Almost on cue, OPEC f***ed with him, announcing a plan to cut oil production by two million barrels per day. The move came less than three months after Biden made a hat-in-hand trip to Saudi Arabia to beg for increased production amid an energy crunch in the US that saw gas prices hit an all-time record of $5.06 a gallon in mid-June.
The groveling helped underscore the folly of President Biden’s war on domestic energy production.
“No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry,” Biden promised during the 2020 campaign. “No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill period, [it] ends.”
Leaders of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wouldn’t even take his phone calls.
The day after his inauguration, the new president signed an executive order effectively shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, and then suspended all new oil and gas permits on federally owned lands and in federally controlled waterways. Why? Because, as he put it in a speech in July, “climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”
With domestic production unable to meet the increase in demand as COVID-19 restrictions eased, Biden had painted himself into a corner. With gas prices soaring throughout the spring and threatening his Democratic majorities in Congress, Biden reached out to the brutal Maduro regime in Venezuela to discuss oil sales but was reportedly rebuffed. Leaders of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wouldn’t even take his phone calls.
How far the US has fallen. Less than four years ago, under President Donald Trump’s aggressive domestic energy push, America became a net oil exporter for the first time in three-quarters of a century. The benefits were felt immediately: Not only was the nation far less dependent upon the world’s bad actors, but the price of gas fell dramatically after years of record highs under the Obama Administration.
Gas prices during Obama’s presidency averaged $2.96 a gallon and spent nearly four full years above $3.00, but under Trump, the average price fell to $2.48 per gallon. Even taking out the pandemic year of 2020, when demand plummeted to unprecedented lows, the average price was just $2.57. At no point in Trump’s four years in office did the national average hit $3.00 per gallon.
In contrast, under President Biden the average price of gas hasn’t dropped below $3.00 a gallon in the past 16 months. Gas prices in the Biden Administration $3.55 a gallon and rose from $2.39 on the day Trump left office and climbed to $3.02 in just 16 weeks. While Biden loves to scapegoat Vladimir Putin for high gas prices, they averaged $3.11 during the 13 months he was in office before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Rather than admit his mistake in dramatically slowing down domestic drilling, Biden shortsightedly bled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level in nearly 40 years and naively assumed he could trust the Saudis to bail him out of the jam he created.
Instead, they f***ed with him, and the rest of the country is paying for his mistakes.
