As spiking gas prices are clobbering American drivers, the Biden administration’s twofold response has been to first blame the surging costs on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — despite the fact that the price of gas had been steadily rising for months prior to the war — and, second, a tone-deaf suggestion for people to buy electric vehicles.

Again, the notion that Putin is responsible for gas prices fails to explain why they had been rising for months. The truth, as we have repeatedly pointed out, is that Joe Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies are the primary cause. He reversed Donald Trump’s effective actions that had the U.S. becoming a net exporter of oil to once again making the nation a net importer. The number of approved drilling permits, for example, has fallen 85% since last spring.

“The current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin. It has nothing to do with the [$1.9 trillion] American Rescue Plan,” Biden claims. The bit about the “current spike” may be partly correct, but the problem is that Biden enabled Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, so the blame for that spike immediately comes full circle. (Or, as Jen Psaki would say, it “circles back.”)

As for Biden’s so-called American Rescue Plan, Mark Alexander notes: “That was $1.9 trillion in taxpayer-funded graft to fill a $300 billion economic hole created by the ChiCom Virus pandemic. The remaining $1.6 trillion is indisputably a major factor in the inflation now crushing family budgets.”

The average price of gas in January 2021 was $2.39. This past January, the price had risen to $2.86, and in mid-February — before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — the price was up to $3.49 a gallon. Today, it’s up to $4.31. The truth is that high gas prices are part of Biden’s plan to force America into his administration’s “green economy” dream. In fact, there are even calls to advance the Green New Deal through an executive action declaring a “climate emergency.”

As Mark Alexander has also noted: “Despite Biden’s petroleum reserve charade, he is absolutely committed to higher pump prices to force Americans into his ‘green’ agenda. Joe Biden has neither pumped nor paid for his own gas in decades.”

Which brings us to the most important question: If Putin were entirely responsible for the skyrocketing prices at the pump, then how in the world would making America even more dependent on the Russian dictator solve the problem?

This is exactly where Biden’s EV “solution” is exposed as a classic bait-and-switch. We’d be shifting dependence on foreign oil to dependence on foreign material sources for EV batteries.

The essential component of every electric vehicle is its battery. And these batteries don’t make energy; they simply store it (which is another story). A look at the materials required to make these batteries quickly dispels the erroneous claim that EVs are environmentally friendly or that they would help make the U.S. more energy independent. A typical EV battery weighs more than 1,000 pounds. On average it contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, and 400 pounds of aluminum. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. And Russia just happens to be a key provider of nickel — some 7% of the globe supply comes from Russia.

Biden’s drive toward an EV economy would actually make America even more beholden to our geopolitical foes, China and Russia. Biden’s energy policy has the U.S. over the proverbial barrel, and switching to EVs will only make it worse.