Biden’s “Putin Price Hike” Lie
The actions that Joe Biden has taken that are currently contributing to the increase of American energy prices
“C’mon man” [End of quote] [Repeat the line] “C’mon man”
That’s what I want to say to Joe Biden right now as I pay >$40 to fill up my Honda Civic, reminiscing of the days just over a year ago when it cost me under $20. Among rising prices for most goods and inflation, gas may have the highest price hike of all common goods.
Despite endless attempts to blame rising prices of fuel and other goods on Putin and Russia’s attack on Ukraine, it is quite clear that the majority of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Joe Biden. Before he was even elected as president, one of his major campaign messages was that he would end American dependence on fossil fuels. He literally admitted that he would take action against the fossil fuel industry. And people still won’t accept that his administration is responsible for the rising prices.
If you have kept up with the Biden administration, you have surely seen the utter incompetence of Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary as of May 13, 2022. While Jen Psaki would never give a straight answer to questions, I do have to give her some credit, because at least she was masterful at “circling back” and was able to address questions and comments by putting spin on the narrative. Two months into Jean-Pierre’s term as press secretary, I shockingly want Jen Psaki back.
It is quite rare to see Jean-Pierre respond to a question with truth or even an answer. She’ll look at her notes for 30 seconds after a question from Peter Doocy and then proceed to say something along the lines of “We don’t currently have information on that.” She also has claimed on several occasions that the economy is great, most recently saying “we are in the greatest economy in history.”
Joe Biden has blamed the price increases on Putin so often as the “Putin Price Hike” that it has become laughable. In July, the national average gas price is down about 20 cents per gallon, so is it now the Putin gas sale?
Shall we take a trip down memory lane and review some of the actions of the Biden administration that have led to our current situation? Let’s jump in!
(For the sake of being concise, I will only detail a few major causes of rising gas prices. There are well over 100 actions taken by Biden that have contributed, and I can’t get into them all.)
January 20, 2021: Hours after taking office, Joe Biden signed dozens of executive orders, with one of them being the cancellation of the lease for the Keystone XL gas and oil pipeline. This pipeline would have been 1,179 miles long, delivering over 830,000 barrels/day of heavy crude oil from Alberta, Canada to connect with existing pipelines in Nebraska. The proposed pipeline would have shifted production away from Latin American countries. In this same executive order, oil and gas development at national wildlife monuments was also halted.
January 20, 2021: Also on his first day, Biden expanded the government’s “social cost of carbon” metric. This artificially increased regulatory costs of fossil fuels, while also claiming there were more “benefits” to ending production. In subsequent executive orders on his first day, he rolled back many executive orders from the Trump administration.
January 27, 2021: Joe Biden signed another executive order to halt new oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters. This moratorium was passed with the excuse of lowering the nation’s contributions to climate change. It also allowed the Department of Interior to review and reconsider the status of existing permits and leases. It did not however ban oil and gas drilling on tribal lands.
January 27, 2021: In yet another Executive Order, Biden:
Directed federal agencies to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies
Committed to “environmental justice” and enforcement of violations
Attacked the energy industry and advancing sustainable development and a “green recovery”
February 2, 2021: Marianne Engelman-Lado was hired by the EPA to promote the Green New Deal social justice agenda. Engelman-Lado is a proponent of “environmental justice”, and her hire shows that the EPA and Biden administration plans to further attacks upon the American fossil fuel industry.
February 4, 2021: In response to Biden’s January 27 EOs, the DOJ withdrew 9 documents from the Trump presidency which eased regulations that would have helped American energy independence.
February 19, 2021: Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. These accords have the consequences of:
Bolstering oil production in OPEC nations and Russia
Increasing European dependence on oil and natural gas from Russia
Benefits China, the supply chain leader for rare earth minerals vital for the production of solar panels, electric batteries, and wind turbines
March 15, 2021: The Securities and Exchange Commission evaluates a rule that would force businesses to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. The implementation of this climate policy would greatly increase compliance costs and discourage oil and gas production.
April 16, 2021: Biden directed Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, to revoke policies from Secretarial Order 3398 passed by the Trump administration. This led to a massive slowdown in activity in the energy sector in the nearly 2.5 billion acres in the Interior Department’s portfolio. This order rejected policies including:
Rejects “American Energy Independence” as a goal
Rejects “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy”
Rejects “strengthening Department of Interior’s energy portfolio”
Rejects establishment of “Executive Committee for Expedited Permitting”
May 20, 2021: Biden passed another executive order, entitled “Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk”. In this order, the regulatory burdens were expanded for businesses in the oil and gas industry. It did so by claiming that the government was taking on additional risk in conducting business with them.
May 28, 2021: Biden included an additional $150 billion in direct taxes on fossil fuel energy producers in his FY 2022 Revenue Proposals.
August 11, 2021: The White House published a statement with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan asking OPEC+ (which includes Russia) to produce more oil.
September 9, 2021: The Department of Education unveiled a new Climate Adaptation Plan (CAP). This plan essentially turns the department into an anti-fossil fuel propaganda wing by including green agenda politics into as many policies as possible.
October 28, 2021: Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna grilled oil company executives on why they were increasing production as European energy producers were decreasing production. He was questioned by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan about why Democrats had asked OPEC and Russia to increase production while pushing for domestic producers to decrease production.
November 2, 2021: In a blow to both the energy and agriculture sectors of the United States, Biden signed a Global Methane Pledge, in which participating countries pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Unsurprisingly, Russia and China did not sign onto this pledge.
November 19, 2021 The Biden-endorsed Build Back Better Act was passed in the House, which included provisions such as:
A new methane tax of up to $1500/ton,
Restrict Arctic energy production and offshore leasing in Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).
Additional fees and royalties for offshore and onshore oil production
An $8 billion tax effective in 2023 imposed upon companies that produce, process, transport, or store oil and natural gas
Raised crude oil tax from 9.7 cents/barrel to 16.4 cents/barrel (amounting to over $13 billion in tax increases on energy production
January 13, 2022: The Clean Energy Corps, a branch of the Department of Energy, announced its plan to hire 1,000 people dedicated to Joe Biden’s plan to end the use of fossil fuels.
February 21, 2022: The Biden administration froze all new oil and gas leases on federal land after a judge ruled against the arbitrary enforcement of the social cost of carbon (SCC) initiatives, dealing another blow to domestic production.
March 16, 2022: The Biden administration doubled down on their proposed social costs of carbon metric after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the lower court ruling that rejected the SCC enforcement.
March 31, 2022: Joe Biden proposed to Congress that companies with unused leases should be penalized, deflecting from all of the actions he has taken that have added regulations, taxes, and bureaucratic red tape that work together to increase production costs.
March 31, 2022: Biden’s $5.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2023 includes many policies that were not passed in his Build Back Better Act:
$50 billion for programs to address climate change
$18 billion to build government’s “resilience to climate change”
To fund the increased climate spending, Biden wants congress to remove tax provisions that encourage domestic production.
Removes tax deductions that would enable small producers to increase output
April 15, 2022: The Biden administration was required to open 144,000 acres of federal mineral estate for oil and gas leasing due to the court ruling against them. This amounts to only 0.00589% of the 2.46 billion acres. The administration also announced that the royalty rate would be 50% higher for resumed leases.
April 25, 2022: Biden released a plan for the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska which would end Trump’s plan to open most of the land for drilling leases.
April 28, 2022: The Biden administration quietly blamed their use of faulty math models which overestimated effects on wildlife and climate as the reason for delays in issuing permits.
May 18, 2022: The Biden administration canceled not one, but two lease sales:
The first was the sale of over 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet in Alaska
The second was a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico
This list only takes into account a lot of the direct actions that have been taken either by Joe Biden or his administration which have had a negative effect on the oil and gas industry. All of these actions and more have worked to decrease domestic production, expand the regulations and taxes on domestic producers, raise energy prices around the country, and increase global dependence on OPEC and Russia for oil. This list does not factor in the over $80 billion which has been taken from American citizens and given to Ukraine.
In the last few days, reports have also come out that Joe Biden made the decision to release over 5 million barrels (around 1%) of our Strategic Reserve to Europe and Asia, with shipments going to the Netherlands, India, China, and more. While this move was supposedly intended to decrease prices, it will likely fail to make any significant impact, because countries such as Saudi Arabia could decide to flood the market or lower their own production to counter any move made by the United States. It was also revealed that the Biden administration sold 950,000 barrels of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. This move in itself is a horrible abuse of power, but it gets worse. The company, commonly referred to as Sinopec, is tied to Hunter Biden. In 2015, through his private equity firm, Hunter Biden purchased a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec. Even further, after the United States and other nations launched sanctions against Russia in March upon their invasion of Ukraine, Sinopec entered into negotiations to purchase the Russian gas conglomerate, Gazprom.
In another blow to our domestic oil and gas production, on Saturday, July 9, an explosion rocked a OneOK gas plant in Medford, Oklahoma. The explosion was so large that it produced a 1.7 magnitude earthquake, and Medford residents within 2 miles of the plant were advised to evacuate their homes. After the explosion, a blazing fire engulfed the natural gas plant and smoke and fire could be seen reaching hundreds of feet into the air. Fortunately, no deaths or injuries were reported at the scene of the disaster, and the story is still developing. Obviously this explosion has nothing to do with the Biden administration, however it occurred while we face the current gas crisis.
Next time you see Joe Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, or any other politician claim that we are in a great economy or that Putin is causing our high gas prices, think back to this list of actions taken by Joe Biden and his administration. When you have to pay double for your morning commute or your cross country road trip and see Joe Biden “I Did That!” stickers, know that they are “mostly true” in the words of a fact checker.
All that being said, it is imperative that no matter how much you dislike the president, people ought to wish for the success of the United States. Recent weeks have brought up a lot of talk about civil war or a “national divorce”, a situation in which some states could choose to secede peacefully to avoid any violence and conflict. Neither of these situations would be ideal, but a national divorce would be much preferable to a civil war. No matter how many journalists, podcasters, and politicians may discuss the possibility of the next civil war, no one truly wants another American civil war, where brothers fought brothers and blood was shed on our own soil.
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References:
https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-officially-rejoins-the-paris-agreement/
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanations-FY2022.pdf
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_21_5766
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376/text
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/21/us/biden-climate-social-cost-of-carbon-court/index.html
https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/19/biden-administration-oil-gas-drilling-permit-delays/
Biden's scorched earth campaign against the American energy industry continues...informative, well written and very well researched.
An excellent summary of the facts! Nice one, Brandon!
Biden's administration (and future Presidents) should seriously try being candid with the American people. There is some semblance of logic (fossil fuels are bad for the environment, etc.) which could resonate with at least some slice of the population.
Instead, grossly simplified misdirection has become the norm. It's just not sustainable.