In his latest bid to sound like he’s doing something about soaring energy costs, President Joe Biden late Monday robotically threatened oil and gas companies with a windfall-profits tax if they don’t magically lower prices.
He claims to be furious that they’re paying huge dividends to shareholders rather than re-investing profits in new production. Yet his administration has been pushing them not to invest in new capacity from the start, among other things by:
- refusing to issue drilling permits (Team Joe has set the lowest pace for those OKs since the Truman administration)
- nixing pipelines and opposing new refineries
- issuing rules that companies need to plan on the assumption that oil and gas supplies will plummet in value as alternative energy miraculously becomes competitive
Heck, he promised during the 2020 campaign, “I guarantee you, I guarantee you we are going to end fossil fuel.”
And all this is part of a years-long push across the West to cut production, as politicians rush to appease the green extremists who falsely claim doom unless the world replaces the carbon-based fuels that now provide more than 80% of its energy.
Plus, even Biden’s threat is empty: He’d be hard-pressed to get the current Congress to pass a windfall-profits tax, and Democrats are poised to lose the House and perhaps the Senate next week.
Give us a break, Joe. Enough is enough.