If you are alive and breathing, you have noticed that the price of gas has gone up significantly since Biden took office. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm blames COVID-19 for the rise in prices. That is ludicrous. President Trump was in office for the better part of a year and the prices went down not up. Less driving means less demand while refineries kept refining their oil. Abundant supplies and decreasing demand means lower prices.
The truth is Joe Biden is not hiding the fact that he is going to greatly reduce our oil production. He has already held back oil leases on public lands and is looking at offshore drilling. He canceled the Keystone pipeline, meaning a much higher cost to transport the oil in trucks and on trains. Warren Buffet owns the trains. On election day the average price for gas was at $2.11 a gallon. Today the average is $2.96 a gallon.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted Granholm about the spiraling of the price of gasoline. He asked her if the high price of gasoline will affect the recovery from the pandemic.
Tapper asked:
“Beyond whether or not you think your policies are to blame, are you worried that the prices could impact whether or not Americans travel, which is, of course, needed to put money back into the economy?”
Granholm replied:
“People need to travel, you’re right, but we need to get the virus under control first, we need to get to that 70%, we need to get to herd immunity.”
“Why have gas prices gone up? Could that be because of the virus itself as well? Everything is tied together. So I just want to say, this administration is totally focused on getting this virus under control, which means the economy will get under control, and then investing in the nation so that we can go big on America.”
Oil expert David Blackmon explained:
President Biden’s Day 1 executive orders to cancel the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and suspend the program for oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters were just initial shots across the bow. His order to raise the estimate for the “social cost of carbon” by over 700% will inevitably result in regulatory actions that will raise the cost of producing oil in the U.S., as will the coming effort by the Biden EPA to convince the courts to allow it to regulate carbon as a “criteria pollutant,” a topic I’ll address in more detail in the coming days.
All of these actions and more to come will increase the costs of not just oil and gasoline, but all forms of non-renewable energy for consumers, will make the country increasingly reliant on foreign oil imports and thus will render the country less energy secure than before. These outcomes are entirely predictable and are in fact features of the Biden/Harris plan, which is in part designed to make EVs and renewables more competitive by raising the cost of fossil fuels and other more traditional forms of energy. That’s not a value judgment: it’s just reality.
