The summer’s heavy driving months are here, so President Biden is once again blaming high gas prices on anyone but himself.
First it was Trump. Then it was Putin.
And now, with the price at the pump still at or above $4 a gallon in many markets, Biden is pointing the finger at oil company “greed.”
He even wants to bring antitrust action against “big oil” executives for allegedly conspiring with OPEC to reduce supply and keep retail gas prices high.
But if restricting oil and gas supply is a crime, he had better put himself behind bars.
This is the man who, from the moment he came into office, declared that he wanted to bankrupt the oil and gas industry.
The Biden administration has enacted some 200 rules, regulations and executive orders to limit oil and gas production here at home, as part of his climate change agenda and the “great transition” to zero fossil fuel production.
Remember, one of Biden’s first actions as president was to kill the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Now he says he wants oil companies to produce more oil?
Really? Has he told his radical climate-change activist friends?
Our new report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which I co-authored with Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, finds that although US oil production has risen in the last two years to about 13 million barrels daily, America would be producing between two and three million more barrels per day if we had simply stuck with President Trump’s pro-oil and gas strategy — and if new ESG nuisance initiatives weren’t interfering with domestic drilling.
Energy experts had predicted that US oil producers would be at 16 million barrels of domestic production each day by now, if the Trump administration’s policies had remained in place.
The Biden war on American oil and gas has cost American motorists and the overall American economy dearly.
Over the past three and a half years, our domestic production would have been almost 2.5 billion barrels higher if Biden and radical environmental activists had simply left the industry alone.
At the average world price of $75 a barrel, these attacks on fossil fuels have meant a $150 billion loss of domestic output.
The shale revolution that the United States started had already tripled American output in the 12 years before Trump left office, and was once on pace to reach 16 million barrels a day by 2024.
The price at the pump today might be closer to $3 a gallon if that increased supply had materialized.
What’s doubly maddening is that Biden couldn’t have played more directly into the hands of the Iranians, the Russians and the Saudis if he were intentionally conspiring to make them money.
Foreign dictators are enriched when the United States restricts its domestic supply, because the restriction raises the worldwide price.
By undermining shale activity in the US, we hand OPEC more monopoly pricing power, because we are no longer able to quickly respond to their production cuts with production increases of our own.
Trump, in contrast, had brought OPEC to its knees.
Instead of allowing the spigots to run full blast for our domestic industry, Biden’s latest scheme is to tap another several million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
This is less than 1% of the amount we could be getting from a pro-drilling policy.
On top of that, Biden recently restricted drilling on 13 million acres of prime oil land in Alaska — another boneheaded Biden move.
A return to the Trump administration’s pro-drilling policies would mean a supply increase up to a thousand times greater than Biden’s planned SPR raid.
Gas was less than $2.50 a gallon when Trump left office. If not for the Biden war on fossil fuels, we might be paying even less than that today.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.