Pain at the pump: What long-term solutions can lower gas prices?
PRICE Futures Group senior analyst Phil Flynn, Geltrude & Company founder Dan Geltrude and IRC Wealth CEO David Ragland discuss gas and oil prices, supply chain issues and energy stocks.
President Biden is the kind of man who deliberately would steer his car into a ditch, crawl from the wreckage, and then probe the ditch for criminal conduct.
Such nonsense mirrors Biden’s recent instructions to the Federal Trade Commission to indulge his fanciful conspiracy theory: the U.S. petroleum industry's plots and plans have fueled vertiginous rises in energy prices. Citing "mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies," Biden told the FTC to "bring all of the Commission’s tools to bear if you uncover any wrongdoing."
DCCC BLASTED FROM ALL SIDES OVER TWEET PRAISING BIDEN FOR LOWERING GAS PRICES 2 CENTS
At a minimum, such collusion would violate the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. Any general counsel worth his weight in depositions would sit on a live grenade before exposing his company to such legal peril.
Is Biden cynical enough to blame Big Oil for a national fiasco that he concocted? Or is he so touchingly self-unaware that he misses the connection between higher pump prices and his own War on Oil?
Biden told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in June 2007 his plan to cut gasoline costs: "As president of the United States, use the Justice Department to go in an investigate this whole issue of price-gouging."
So, Biden’s paranoia that Big Oil fixes prices has historical roots. It also is baseless. When Biden made similar noises in September, the Associated Press put him in his place. "THE FACTS: There actually is little evidence something nefarious is behind the higher gasoline prices, as Biden suggests."
OIL CLIMBS AS OPEC STICKS TO ITS OWN COURSE
It takes profound naivete for Biden not to recognize how his and his team’s anti-oil animus has driven fuel costs skyward. In fewer than 11 months, this administration has:
•Killed the Keystone XL Pipeline
•Threatened to plug the Canada-to-Michigan Enbridge Line 5 pipeline
•Halted oil leases in a sliver of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
•Stopped oil and gas leases on federal lands
•Proposed a methane tax that could cost this industry up to $10 billion annually
•Encouraged Left-wing activists to pressure financiers to defund oil companies
And how is this multi-front War on Oil working out? As predicted.
In October 2021, U.S. oil drilling had plunged 38 percent versus October 2019, before COVID-19 derailed the booming Trump-GOP economy. With supply down and demand up (as COVID-related instability has eased), regular unleaded gasoline retailed on October 25, 2021, for $3.38 per gallon compared to $2.59 on October 28, 2019 -- up 30.5 percent. On those dates, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s price for West Texas Intermediate crude was $83.94 per barrel, versus $56.65 -- up 48.2 percent. Likewise, natural gas drilling had slid 28.9 percent, while prices were $5.90 per million BTUs vs. $2.45 – up 140.8 percent.
Team Biden’s sadism toward their fellow Americans exposes the thuggish side of their anti-oil fanaticism.
•Biden himself told New Hampshire voters in September 2019: "I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuels.
•Then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., said in November 2016, "We ought to be doing everything we possibly can to keep fossil fuel energy in the ground." Granholm is now U.S. Secretary of Energy.
•"I want fossil fuels gone," White House Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in October 2020. "I want fossil fuels out of products. I don’t want to help the fossil fuel industry to extend their life."
•Saule Omarova – Biden’s Kazakh-born, Soviet-educated, Brezhnev-flavored nominee for Comptroller of the Currency – spoke in February about fossil-fuel companies: "We want them to go bankrupt, if we want to tackle climate change."
Given the religious fervor that informs Team Biden’s hatred of oil, their current actions are utterly incoherent. To escape the political Hell of what they consider high-gas-price Heaven, Biden begs OPEC and the Kremlin to increase oil output. This is like the Anti-Saloon League beseeching Scotland to boost whiskey production after Prohibition shuttered U.S. distilleries.
Devolving America from Trump-era energy independence to Biden-era energy dependence on Arab sheiks and Vladimir Putin creates potential foreign-policy nightmares. "We are much stronger as a nation if we are selling energy to our friends than if we have to buy it from our enemies," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told "Fox News Sunday."
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Relying on the Middle East and Moscow for energy also undermines Biden’s own environmental objectives. At the margin, Biden’s approach would generate more carbon dioxide. North American crude cleanly crosses U.S. territory (and, to a degree, the Canadian border) via carbon-neutral pipelines. Conversely, Arab and Russian oil must traverse oceans and approach U.S. ports on fuel-burning, emissions-generating supertankers.
Like American reserves, OPEC’s and Russia’s oil also produces CO2 when consumed, but with the added disadvantage of destroyed American jobs. By killing Keystone on his first day as president, Biden obliterated a thousand unionized positions, some 10,000 future jobs, and $2.2 billion in wages.
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American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers encapsulated the infinite absurdity of Biden’s policy. "There’s quite a bit of irony here that the president, over the course of the last couple of weeks, has been begging OPEC to produce more. OPEC is a price-gouging cartel."
The president should pause his self-combusting, ecologically contradictory War on Oil long enough to isolate the root cause of high energy prices.
Hint: He’s married to Dr. Jill Biden.