Biden Makes the U.S. Energy-Dependent Again
Biden Makes the U.S. Energy-Dependent Again
Begs OPEC for more oil as gas prices surge to a 7-year high.
By Joseph Klein
President Biden was not done humiliating the United States with his disastrous withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan. Now he is literally begging Saudi Arabia and other OPEC cartel countries for more oil.
Gas prices at the pump are at a seven-year high. The average retail gasoline price is now more than one dollar per gallon higher than it was a year ago. Americans are feeling the pain every time they fill up their gas tanks.
During his softball CNN town hall on October 21st, Biden conceded that “we’re about $3.30 a gallon most places now,” noting that the price had previously been “down in the single digits — I mean single digits, a dollar-plus.”
What is Biden’s explanation for the incredible rise in gas prices over the last year? He blamed Americans’ plight on the supply of oil “being withheld by OPEC.”
Import petroleum prices have increased 70.5 percent from September 2020 to September 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is no sign that this trend will be reversed anytime soon.
Thus, it is unsurprising that Biden admitted he doesn’t see gas prices coming down until “into next year, 2022,” at the earliest. “I don’t see anything that’s going to happen in the meantime that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices,” Biden said.
What Biden did not say, of course, is that his own war on fossil fuels largely caused this problem. Biden turned the clock back to the time when the United States was dependent on Middle East oil — before former President Donald Trump had managed to make the U.S. energy-independent.
“There’s a possibility to be able to bring it down, depends on — a little bit on Saudi Arabia and a few other things that are in the offing,” Biden said without specifying what those “few other things” are.
Trump had managed to wean the country off of dependence on Middle East oil. During the Trump administration, the United States became the number one producer of oil in the world while maintaining America’s position as the number one producer of natural gas. For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States had become a net energy exporter.
The Trump administration accomplished this feat with such measures as dismantling burdensome regulations, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent, approving oil pipelines such as the Keystone XL pipeline, and pulling out of the one-sided Paris Climate Agreement that China was gaming.
Meanwhile, the U.S. was significantly reducing carbon emissions without having to be tied down by the job-killing constraints that the Obama-Biden administration had agreed to impose on America’s energy sector in its Paris Climate Agreement commitments.
Joe Biden resolved to reverse everything that Trump had done to achieve energy independence. Like the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border, Biden helped to create the conditions leading to the surging gas prices that American consumers are experiencing this year.
Biden’s war on fossil fuels began with his January 20, 2021 executive order shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline that would have delivered more than 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta Canada into the United States.
Days later, Biden issued an executive order imposing a moratorium on new oil and gas lease permits on federal lands and water.
Biden also brought the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement. “First thing I committed to do is rejoin that accord, number one,” Biden said at the CNN town hall. The Communist Chinese regime could not be happier.
Biden’s long-term answer to the present energy quagmire “is investing in renewable energy,” he told the CNN town hall audience. He is anticipating “well over a trillion dollars worth of expenditures for climate change,” if Congress passes his Build Back Better tax-and-spend plan.
The Biden administration is also proposing onerous regulations that will put the United States at a further economic disadvantage vis-a-vis China.
The Communist Chinese regime is already flouting the modest commitments it made under the Paris Climate Agreement by accelerating coal mining and building more coal-fired electric plants within the country the regime rules with an iron hand.
In fact, the Chinese government “has ordered all coal mines to operate at full capacity even during holidays, issued approvals for new mines and ordered major coal production bases in north and northwestern China,” according to the Wall Street Journal. China is also importing coal from Australia.
Moreover, China is embarked on an aggressive roll-out of new coal fired electric power plants.
“Last year, China built more than three times more new coal power capacity than all other countries in the world combined,” the New York Times reported on September 21, 2021.
While Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged that China would no longer build new coal-fired power projects abroad, China is continuing to add coal-fired electric power plants at home.
“China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces — equivalent to adding about 1.5% to its current annual emissions,” Time reported last August, based on an analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy (CREA). “The new projects were announced in the first half of this year despite the world’s largest polluter pledging to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030, and to make the country carbon neutral by 2060.”
At this pace, China will be building nearly one coal plant unit per week. Clean energy installations have fallen in China this year compared to 2020, according to CREA. The CREA analysis concluded that there is “no clear increasing trend in the share of power demand growth covered by zero-emissions sources.” China’s newly installed wind, solar and nuclear capacity is “a far cry from the levels required towards the end of this decade to meet the emission peaking pledge” that China had made as part of its participation in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Meanwhile, as China continues to flout its modest greenhouse gas emission commitments, Biden boasted during the CNN town hall that “I’m presenting a commitment to the world that we will, in fact, get to net zero emissions on electric power by 2035.”
Watch out for skyrocketing electricity prices.
The 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) commences on October 31st in Glasgow, Scotland. This summit meeting of world leaders is a follow-up to the 2015 conference in Paris, which resulted in the Paris Climate Agreement.
“We’re going to be there with bells on,” Biden said during his September White House meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who will be hosting the Glasgow meeting. As of the writing of this article, China’s President Xi has not said whether he plans to attend, with or without bells on.
The question is whether Biden’s planned “commitment to the world” on getting to net zero emissions on electric power by 2035, or any other radical commitments he intends to present, will cause the bells to toll for the U.S. economy and American consumers.