In Brief: Biden Throttled U.S. Energy Production
And he did it deliberately and illegally, just when we need it the most.
The most common refrain from Joe Biden and his Democrat and Leftmedia cadres is that Vladimir Putin is to blame for the dramatic rise in gas prices recently. There’s a kernel of truth to that, but Biden’s game is to obscure his own role. The Heritage Foundation’s GianCarlo Canaparo explains:
Gas prices, already high and rising due to supply chain problems and inflation, skyrocketed when Biden announced a ban on U.S. imports of Russian oil. Before making that announcement, a capable administration would have started getting government out of the way of domestic energy producers and opening access to our vast oil and gas resources on public lands.
Instead, Biden’s administration has made it more difficult for America to produce and sell energy. Rather than clear the way for American energy producers, Biden prefers to ask human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran to do for the United States what he will not.
At first, Biden patted himself on the back for his plans to restrict oil and natural gas-based energy. Now that gasoline prices are really taking off, however, he denies that he has slowed domestic oil drilling.
But he has.
Canaparo recounts the history for those who lack context:
Not only did he block major oil and gas operations, but he also broke the law to do it.
On Biden’s first day in office, he issued an executive order directing the secretary of the interior to put a “temporary” (bureaucratese for “permanent”) moratorium on the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That program directs the Bureau of Land Management to lease certain lands in Alaska for oil and gas extraction.
A few days later, he issued another order “pausing” oil and gas leases on all public lands and waters.
According to the bureau, Alaska’s Coastal Plain is “some of the most highly prospective land on Alaska’s North Slope.” It contains billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. It is a king’s ransom of energy wealth, and the law requires that the administration make it available for extraction.
Former President Donald Trump’s administration complied, and the bureau began issuing leases to energy firms toward the end of his term. But Biden terminated the program immediately and likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act in the process. His decision to pause leases on public lands, meanwhile, violated another law that requires quarterly lease sales.
The result: Biden has unlawfully trapped much of America’s vast energy reserves behind a wall of bureaucratic red tape, leaving them unavailable now that the country needs them. Because of that, Americans will suffer at the pumps far more than they ought to.
What is Biden doing about it? “His administration is telling people to buy electric cars.”
