Biden Tries to Blame Energy Failures on ‘Putin’s Gas Price Hike’
No matter how desperately he tries to deflect blame, it’s obviously a “Biden spike.”
by David Catron
March 10, 2022, 10:41 PM
When President Biden was inaugurated, the average price of regular gasoline in the U.S. was $2.38. A little over a year later, the price has reached a record high of $4.32. Attempts by the White House to blame this increase on Vladimir Putin notwithstanding, the price had already risen to $3.53 before Russia invaded Ukraine. The problem is obviously the direct result of Biden’s irresponsible energy policies. During his first few weeks in office he issued a series of executive orders for the explicit purpose of discouraging domestic energy production — while demand for fuel was rapidly increasing. The inevitable result has been stratospheric gas prices.
The attempt to label this increase “the Putin spike” is only the latest red herring the White House has deployed to divert public attention from the genuine cause of the problem. When prices began to rise, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed, “Now, we know that some of the issue here is supply as a result of the pandemic.” By November, we were told that the villain of the piece was the avaricious energy industry, and Biden directed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate “anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies.” The real issue is the Biden administration’s ignorance concerning the laws of supply and demand. As the Manhattan Institute’s Jonathan Lesser explains in the Wall Street Journal:
The run-up in gasoline prices has been caused by the reduction in domestic production and inelastic demand. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, domestic crude-oil production increased by almost 50% from about 8.9 million barrels per day in January 2017 to 12.9 million bpd in November 2019.… This year, production has averaged around 11 million bpd. A 1-2 million bpd decrease may not sound like much. But consumers cannot suddenly switch to more efficient vehicles and have few options for significantly adjusting their consumption.
Not coincidentally, Biden’s ill-considered energy decisions very much resemble those of his erstwhile boss, former President Obama. When the latter took office in 2009, the average price per gallon of regular gasoline was $1.85. Like Biden, he declared war on the energy industry and by May 2011, the price had skyrocketed to $3.96. During the next three years, the average price of gasoline remained over $3.50 per gallon. Obama’s invariable response to any suggestion that these prices could be reduced by exploiting domestic oil reserves was, “We can’t just drill our way out of the problem.” This was subsequently proven to be nonsense by energy producers who developed the technologies that resulted in the shale boom.
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https://spectator.org/putin-russia-biden-oil-spike/
