The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden's Gas Pains Exacerbated
Why does Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine matter to you? One of many reasons is that it’s hitting you directly in the wallet.
If you thought 7.5% inflation was already bad, wait until the real oil and gas price shock hits. Oh wait … here it comes. Oil prices jumped 8% this morning, toping $100 a barrel for the first time since Joe Biden was vice president in 2014. Oil is up more than 25% so far this year. Gasoline prices are up nearly 50% since Biden became president last January.
Given that Russia is a world leader in oil production and the second-largest producer of natural gas, energy prices are bound to keep rising. In fact, analysts fear $125 per barrel is just around the corner, perhaps pushing gasoline to an average of more than $4 per gallon. Californians already paying upwards of $6 per gallon can only sigh and shake their heads.
“That border way over there doesn’t matter,” some say. Well, check again. It matters.
Energy prices aren’t going up solely because of Russia’s invasion, of course. Biden launched his radical climate agenda on his first day in office, setting about to undo Donald Trump’s great work to unleash the American energy juggernaut. It’s all aimed at making Americans pay more for energy because the fossil fuels that drive our economy are “bad” according to the distorted moral code of the ecofascist Left.
Biden began with killing the Keystone XL pipeline, and he’s generally made oil production in America much more difficult. Just this week — great timing — came the announcement that he’s halting new oil and gas leases on federal lands.
Why? Because U.S. District Judge James Cain blocked his administration’s calculations on the supposed “social cost of carbon.” Also on his first day in office, the Associated Press explains that Biden “restored the climate cost estimate to about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, after President Donald Trump had reduced the figure to $7 or less per ton.”
The result? Lots of “I did that” Biden stickers on your local gas pumps — and that was before Russia’s invasion. Those stickers will keep showing up as long as Biden’s making the price of gasoline rise, which seems to be one of his primary objectives while in office. He’s got electric cars to mandate and subsidize, after all, so he and his fellow Democrats want gas prices to skyrocket.
Frankly, that calculation could have played a role in the pandemic shutdowns, which caused oil demand to crater. When demand returned, Biden didn’t allow more production here. He begged OPEC to increase production. Instead, OPEC saw its chance to reassert power over the market and told Biden to pound sand.
Back to Russia, U.S. imports of Russian oil reached an all-time high in Biden’s first year, and Russia became the number two supplier of oil in America. Remember that when you see the Leftmedia talking about how much Biden is “standing up” to Putin, or that Putin sure does wish he still had Trump to push around. And, again, remember it when you wonder why you should care about Ukraine.
As political analyst Katie Pavlich put it: “What you’re seeing now, as this Russia-Ukraine war starts to play out, [is] the administration trying to brace Americans for higher gas prices. And the reality is that Joe Biden is now seeing his climate change agenda collide with this national security foreign policy crisis overseas.” One benefit of the U.S. having been virtually energy independent, she adds, was that “you don’t have to worry about wars in foreign lands far away affecting prices here.” At least not as much. She warns that Biden will use Russia as a “convenient excuse” and scapegoat for higher prices here “when the policies of this administration are really the reason why they’re up.”
A final point about the shockwaves of Biden’s inflation bomb: The more prices for gasoline and diesel rise, the more expensive shipping and goods become and the more difficult it will be to restore our broken supply chain. Higher energy prices cause all prices to rise. That’s true of Biden’s magic infrastructure bill too. The $1 trillion in spending passed by Congress last year won’t go nearly as far when materials, labor, and fuel cost so much more.
But hey, at least Biden doesn’t send mean tweets.