Gas prices have skyrocketed to a seven-year high and the Biden administration is laughing about it.
A year ago, in November 2020, the average gas price was $2.11 per gallon. And by November 2021, the national average gas price had shot up to $3.42.
This is an especially bad year for Americans to pay 61 percent more for gas, considering that inflation has soared to a 30-year high and nearly everything else is more expensive as well.
On November 5, a Bloomberg anchor asked Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm about the Biden administration’s plans to reduce gas prices. Granholm laughed and said, “Oil is a global market. It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]. And they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were planning.”
Granholm essentially told the anchor that America, which happens to rest on an abundance of fossil fuels, is at the mercy of an oil cartel made up largely of countries run by despots, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
COVID-19 has become an all-encompassing scapegoat. “If COVID wouldn’t have happened, we would not be at $3.42 a gallon today,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, recently told The Dispatch. “For the simple reason that oil companies would not have had to let go workers and shut down oil production.” Interestingly, in April, De Haan told Fox Business that Biden’s policies would lead to higher gas prices, especially if supply didn’t keep up with demand. Now he says this is all COVID’s fault.
De Haan’s most recent point and Granholm’s are somewhat at odds. One claims supply isn’t keeping up with demand because there aren’t enough workers to make it happen. The other claims that supply is low because OPEC simply refuses to increase production.
What Americans are experiencing at the pump is the price for having a political party in charge whose agenda is vehemently antagonistic to fossil fuels. Biden has vowed to make the United States achieve net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. From the outset, the Biden administration went after fossil-fuel production. In January, he signed executive orders suspending the issuance of oil and gas permits on federal lands and waters. The Biden administration also canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, and has recently admitted that it’s considering shutting down a pipeline in Michigan. Canceling Keystone automatically led to a loss of thousands of jobs. If the Michigan pipeline is canceled, more jobs will be lost and energy prices will spike.
This administration’s actions affect production and have made America once again dependent on OPEC. History indicates this wouldn’t have happened under a President Donald Trump. Under Trump, the energy industry was tapping America’s abundant fossil fuels. The Trump administration cut regulations that were hampering fossil-fuel production. Trump’s policies rendered America energy-independent for the first time since 1957. America was producing so much oil it had actually become an oil exporter.
But the Biden administration, influenced by the purported goal of reining in so-called human-caused climate change, changed all of that almost overnight. The government is now strangling the fossil-fuels energy market, and it’s everyday Americans who are paying for it. This shouldn’t surprise Americans. In a debate with Bernie Sanders on March 15, 2020, candidate Biden said he would prevent oil companies from drilling as part of the effort to combat climate change. At a CNN debate, he said, “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.”
The Institute of Energy Research warned in May 7, 2020, what would happen if Biden won and got his way. “Biden’s ban on fracking and his ban on oil drilling on federal lands and offshore areas would have devastating results on the economy, jobs, and revenues, and energy prices would skyrocket.… Americans in all states need to take note of these impacts and think carefully about what these policies would mean for their families, their jobs, and their communities.”
The answer to rising energy prices is the free market, the opposite of this administration’s approach. It was government that shut down life to purportedly contain a virus with an overwhelming survival rate. It accomplished no such thing. But it did manage to decimate the economy. Without government intrusion, energy production would be higher and gas prices lower. The government needs to get out of the way and let the market produce the energy that lies so abundantly at our feet. Americans need to wake up and stop electing bureaucrats who continuously seek to control their constituents’ lives.
