The Biden administration has announced that it plans to block new offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific and may allow only 11 new leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska over the next five years. It’s doing that all while releasing our strategic reserves to other countries. But, yeah, it’s Vladimir Putin’s price hike.

Biden and his masters on the Left have made it plain that they intend to wipe out fossil fuel production in the United States. Never mind that the so-called green energy infrastructure to replace fossil fuels is not in place and would never match our energy needs even if it were. Never mind that the economy will be severely disrupted, and tens of millions of people will suffer the consequences — including all those jobs Joe Biden’s climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, bragged about killing.

Ever since his first day in office, when he killed the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden has consistently done everything possible to cripple oil and gas suppliers in the U.S. Naturally, the market responded in kind with high gas prices, high inflation, and now a highly likely recession. The president has blamed virtually everyone except himself and the Easter Bunny for the mess. He even took gas stations to task in a tweet that was roundly criticized and ridiculed for its empty-headed premise:

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.

Biden has created this mess, and he’s entirely to blame for it. Unfortunately, we have yet to see the full extent of the damage.

Biden’s attack on the oil and gas industry reverses all the work done during Donald Trump’s presidency to make America energy independent. Remember that brief but glorious time? We were a net exporter of oil and natural gas, prices at home were lower, and we were doing it with environmentally sound practices.

Now Biden is looking to Saudi Arabia to help bridge the gap he created by hamstringing the U.S. oil industry. Don’t count on the Saudis coming to our aid, though. They’re practically at the limit of their refining capacity now — or at least that’s what French President Emmanuel Macron told Biden last week. Nor are the other major oil producers of the world going to help. They’re either (pardon the pun) also tapped out, or, like Iran and Venezuela, they don’t like us much and would prefer to see us suffer.

It’s embarrassing on an epic scale that America should ever beg for oil from other countries, particularly when we have more than enough fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. It’s also bad for national security. If the U.S. can’t meet its energy needs, then it surely won’t be able to meet international commitments or project power overseas at a time of increasing instability abroad. Imagine the U.S. not being able to fulfill its commitment to defend Asia because it has to ration fuel for our Pacific strike groups. That’s not a paranoid delusion.

China, though, isn’t suffering any fossil fuel shortage. Nor do the ChiComs let environmental fantasies guide their energy policy. China has 1,100 coal plants and brings a new one online every week. The U.S. has 240 coal plants and plans to let them die out. China wants to build 150 nuclear reactors in the next 15 years. The U.S. has only two new reactors under construction and an aging fleet of reactors ready to be mothballed.

Yet, for some reason, the Biden administration thought it prudent to export five million barrels from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Europe and Asia last month. That’s just a fraction of the release of 180 million barrels he announced in April to help lower prices raise his poll numbers. (Neither objective worked.) Even so, one of the biggest recipients of this largesse was — wait for it — China. All this while U.S. crude inventories are at their lowest since 2004.

Blaming U.S. oil companies isn’t going to solve this problem, nor is giving away our precious supplies or production capacity to other countries. We either expand drilling and refining at home, or this gets worse. Those are the only two paths available to us. Unfortunately for the country, Joe Biden is stubbornly choosing the wrong one.