As summer driving season arrives, President Biden is once again shifting the blame for rising gas prices onto someone other than himself.
First it was Trump, then it was Putin.
And now, with gas prices still above $4 a gallon in many markets, Biden is blaming the “greed” of oil companies.
He even wants to file antitrust lawsuits against “Big Oil” executives for allegedly conspiring with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to reduce supply and keep retail gas prices high.
But if restricting the supply of oil and gas is a crime, he would be better off in prison himself.
This is a man who declared from the moment he took office that he wanted to bankrupt the oil and gas industry.
The Biden administration has enacted roughly 200 rules, regulations and executive orders to limit domestic oil and gas production as part of a “great shift” to combat climate change and move to zero fossil fuel production.
Remember, one of President Biden’s first acts as president was to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Now he says he is asking oil companies to produce. more oil?
Really? Did he tell his radical climate activist friends?
our New report from the Unlocking Prosperity CommissionU.S. oil production has increased to about 13 million barrels per day over the past two years, but the U.S. would be producing 2 to 3 million barrels per day more if President Trump had stuck to his pro-oil and pro-natural gas strategy and if new ESG nuisance efforts hadn’t hindered domestic drilling, according to a paper co-authored with Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago.
Energy experts had predicted that U.S. oil producers would have reached 16 million barrels per day domestic production by now if the Trump administration’s policies had remained in place.
Biden’s war on American oil and gas has taken a huge toll on American motorists and the American economy as a whole.
If Biden and radical environmentalists hadn’t done anything to the oil industry over the past three and a half years, U.S. domestic production would have increased by about 2.5 billion barrels.
With an average global price of $75 a barrel, such an attack on fossil fuels would mean a loss of $150 billion in domestic production.
The U.S.-initiated shale revolution had already tripled U.S. production in the 12 years before President Trump left office, and was on track to reach 16 million barrels per day by 2024.
If that increase in supply had materialized, gas prices at the pump today could be closer to $3 a gallon.
What’s even more infuriating is that if Biden was deliberately conspiring to benefit Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, he couldn’t have played into their hands more directly.
When America restricts domestic supply, global prices rise, and foreign dictators get richer.
By undermining U.S. shale activity, we give OPEC even more monopoly pricing power, because the U.S. will no longer be able to quickly respond to their production cuts with production increases of its own.
Trump, by contrast, has brought OPEC to its knees.
Biden’s latest plan is to extract millions more barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve rather than turn the oil taps full on for domestic industry.
This is less than 1% of the amount raised from pro-drilling policies.
On top of that, Biden recently restricted drilling on 13 million acres of prime oil lands in Alaska, another foolish move by Biden.
A return to the Trump administration’s pro-drilling policies would mean an increase in supply up to 1,000 times greater than Biden’s planned SPR raid.
When Trump left office, gasoline prices were under $2.50 a gallon, and without Biden’s war on fossil fuels, the prices we pay today may be even lower than that.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-founder of the Commission to Unlock Prosperity.
