Tucker Carlson: The Biden admin is selling off our emergency oil reserves to China
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shreds President Biden's energy policies as Americans struggle with high gas prices on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Just a quick recap on the never-changing rules of the world. The three things that any functioning country must have an ample supply of are food, water and energy. Those are the fundamental necessities of life— not diversity, equity and inclusion — food, water and energy.
If you have a surplus of food, water and energy, you win. If you don't, you lose. Now, that may sound unfair, but we did not make the rules. Nature did. We can choose to ignore them, but those rules will never change. Sorry.
Thankfully for Americans, we live in a country that is remarkably abundant in all three of those things. The U.S. has the most fertile farmland in the world. We've got more potable, fresh water than virtually any other place and critically and rarest of all, America has the largest recoverable oil reserves on the planet. We are number one in that category and that matters maybe more than anything.
Now, they may be telling you on CNN that so-called renewable energy, windmills and solar panels, are about to power the world. But that's absurd and no one corrects them and somebody should because a lot is at stake. If your nine-year-old starts telling you, "I'm like Superman," you have to correct him before he jumps off the garage. The stakes are high, so it is incumbent on the rest of us to point out the people telling you that have no idea what they're talking about. We are not remotely close to a green energy power grid or anything even approaching it.
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In fact, as of today, the world is powered as it has long been by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels. That's where more than 80% of global energy comes from, not from windmills and solar panels, from oil and gas and coal and that is not going to change soon. In fact, the world's fastest growing economies, that would be India and China, are using more fossil fuels than ever, not less. So, why is every person in charge from the people who make the ads at Nike to the energy secretary, to the President of the United States, to every anchor on every channel on television telling you exactly the opposite? We'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
At best, they're ignorant. They're not engineers. They are politicians and ideologues. They're the ones telling you that boys can become girls just by wishing it so, and they've commanded the rest of us to believe that, but unfortunately for them, the principles of social justice do not apply to power grids. You can't just rename them and get something different. No. You have to create new and better power grids and we are nowhere near that and we will not be anywhere near that during the course of our lifetimes. Sorry, that's reality, and you cannot yell loud enough to make it change. For the foreseeable future oil and gas are essential to civilization in an utterly non-negotiable way and that should be great news for America because here in the United States, we have a lot.
We are rich because we are rich in natural resources. That's why we won the Second World War, for example. When previous generations said, as they often did, that God has blessed our country, this is what they were talking about. Yet suddenly, strangely, the United States is suddenly experiencing shortages of both food and energy and that's why prices of these things have risen, because we don't have enough of them. How did that happen? You should know if you care about the future of America, your children's future, you need to know how this happened. Well, Joe Biden offered his explanation of how it happened today at an event in Ohio. Watch.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: We made incredible progress on the economy from where we were a year and a half ago. We've got a long way to go because of inflation, because of the, I call it the Putin tax increase. Putin because of gasoline and all that grain he is keep him from being able to get to the market.
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It's just embarrassing. It's grotesque, actually, and at this point is dangerous and no one believes a word of it because it's provably untrue and we feel, since this is a news network, a moral responsibility to prove that it's untrue. So, here we go. Months before the war in Ukraine began and somehow Vladimir Putin secretly seized control of gas prices in the United States. How did he do that? Before any of that happened, the magic happened.
Sober people, a petroleum analysis firm called GasBuddy, decided to do a simple calculation. They wanted to put rising gas prices in context. Here's what they did: math. They determined every year over year price change in gasoline prices in the United States going back to 2002, 20 years, and they found this. From November of 2020 to November of 2021, that would be roughly from Election Day to the end of Joe Biden's first year running the country, gas prices in the United States went up by more than 66%. That was the single highest year-over-year increase since 2002, which happens to be the year the government started tracking those data.
Now, this happened before Russia invaded Ukraine. Why did it happen? Super simple. Joe Biden on the campaign trail told us he was like Superman, and then he proceeded to jump off the garage. He told us he was going to end fossil fuels and because no one took him seriously, because he's senile and wasn't actually going to win, no one followed up with, "What, are you insane? How are you going to do that? And so we kept going and then he became president somehow and then he followed through on that promise.
President Biden speaks about inflation and supply chain issues at the Port of Los Angeles, Friday, June 10, 2022, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
He canceled pipelines. He terminated oil and gas leases. He rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement without explaining why we should and by the way, if the climate is such a crisis, an existential crisis, and China and India are using more fossil fuels than they did 10 years ago, and nobody says anything about it, maybe they're not really sincere about this global warming thing and then on top of all of that, Joe Biden pumped trillions more dollars into the U.S. economy, thereby devaluing the U.S. dollar and making everything, including energy, more expensive.
You know what happened. That's all true and it was done on purpose. It was done to change our energy supply from what is cheap, efficient and the source of all of our wealth to something that Biden and his donors control, the green economy that will make us poor and that is, in fact, causing famine around the world right now. So, that's what happened. As a political matter, since this is still sort of a democracy, it happened way too fast and scared the hell out of people and polls showed that. Democrats and Republicans, no matter who they voted for, were worried above all about rising energy prices because it hurt them directly every single day. And by the time Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration had found a scapegoat.
Maybe that's why they encouraged him to do it in the first place, which they did. So, Joe Biden started yelling, "It's Putin's price hike. Putin did it!" But it's so dumb. It's so provably untrue that no one believed it. Even people who wanted to believe it, people who voted for Biden who want windmills and solar farms, they couldn't believe it because it's absurd and in an election year, that's a huge problem. So, the administration had to do something.
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That's why in late March, in an act of desperation, Biden did maybe the worst thing that he has done since becoming president and that's saying a lot. He started to sell off one of this country's most important natural resources, one of our most valuable assets. It's called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the SPR. It's controlled by the Department of Energy. So, what Biden could have done is produce more oil domestically, but that would have been too easy and too good for the United States and its long-term interests. Instead, he decided to do something so crazy and so dangerous that only someone who was intentionally trying to harm the United States would even consider it, but most people never even noticed. Here's his announcement, in case you missed it.
BIDEN: Today, I want to talk about one aspect of Putin's war that affects and has real effects on the American people. Putin's price hike that Americans and our allies are feeling at the pump. I know how much it hurts. Our prices are rising because of Putin's actions. There isn't enough supply and the bottom line is, if we want lower gas prices, we need to have more oil supply right now. Today, I'm authorized the release of 1 million barrels per day for the next six months, over 180 million barrels for the strategic, from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year and it is by far the largest release of our net, our national reserve in our history.
So, you watch it and you realize really the whole point of the Joe Biden presidency is to humiliate the rest of us and think less of our own country, the place where we were born. You can just imagine Barack Obama and Susan Rice and Ron Klain, people who truly dislike the United States as currently constituted, saying, "Let's make this guy president. That'll grind it in our face, a guy who can barely talk."
So, it's hard to hear anything Joe Biden says because it's hard for him to say anything, but if you listen carefully or read a transcript, you will learn what he just said is we're releasing a million barrels per day for a total of more than 180 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is held in caverns in a couple of states. How much is that? It's a staggering figure.
So, let's put it in context. The reserve can hold more than 700 million barrels total, but it didn't have that because Congress, by the way, as you haven't been paying attention, has been selling off our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to pay off debt. So, by the time Joe Biden arrived, there was far less than that. There was about 568 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Now, no president in American history has ordered a drawdown this large.
In 1991, the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, which was an actual war with real American soldiers involved, the U.S. government released 17 million barrels of oil as a way of assuring a stable supply of global crude. The U.S. released just 20 million barrels after Hurricane Katrina destroyed parts of the Gulf Coast where so many refineries are. But now we're releasing many times that figure from the reserve all to protect the Democratic Party from getting what it deserves in the midterm elections in November and as a result of that unbelievably reckless, in fact criminal decision, our oil reserves now at their lowest level in nearly 40 years, and they are dropping fast. None of this needed to happen. There was no reason to tap our Strategic Petroleum Reserve when we could produce the energy here and were in fact producing it until Joe Biden took office.
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But at the same time, you have to be honest. Principles of supply and demand would suggest that this would work in the short term. Releasing all this oil should have lowered gas prices until the reserve ran out, which it will. You inject more petroleum into the market and prices for gas should drop, but here's the amazing thing. That's not happening. Since Joe Biden started releasing all this oil from our reserves, which he does not own, you do, we do, what has happened to gas prices? They haven't dropped. They've kept going up. Huh? In mid-June, the price of both regular unleaded and diesel critically hit all-time highs, well over five bucks a gallon nationally. How could this be? It really was a mystery. It violated the most basic rules of economics, but now, thanks to a new report in Reuters, we know why.
It turns out the oil being released isn't for us. It's going to India and China. According to Reuters, and we're quoting, "more than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserve released to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month." The piece continues "cargo of SPR, crude (oil from our reserves) we're also headed to the Netherlands into a Reliance refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo (buckle your seatbelt) headed to China." To China!
So, as gas prices set records in this country, as American citizens who were born here and vote and pay taxes cannot afford to fuel their own cars, the Biden administration is selling off our emergency oil reserves to China. That's not an indictable offense? It's certainly an impeachable one and they should impeach him for that. What are they going to sell the Redwood Forest to China next? How about the water rights to the Great Lakes? That's the equivalent of what he just did.
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Vladimir President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine only eight months after TIME magazine billed President Biden as ready to take on the Russian leader. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Now, if you're keeping track, they didn't even need it. China and India already have access to very cheap oil from Russia. Why? Thanks to the Biden administration's lunatic ban on Russian oil imports for moral reasons. It was a moral victory. The people of Ukraine, remember that? Zelenskyy, he was George Washington, said George W Bush who wouldn't know George Washington if he got in the shower with him.
According to customs data, China spent $19 billion on Russia oil, gas and coal earlier this year. That's double the amount they spent over the same period last year. India spent 5 billion on Russian oil. That's up five times what they spent a year ago. So, we just made Russia a ton of money. What's why the ruble is so strong as the dollar is getting weaker. Russia's raked in $13 billion in additional revenue from India and China compared to the same period last year. Following all this?
This is how we're punishing our enemies by selling off our own most valuable assets and watching Russia and India and, my God, China get richer? Now, on top of all that cheap Russian oil, China is getting petroleum from our emergency petroleum reserves. The crude, by the way, in the SPR is the best crude we have. It's called medium sour crude. It's the easiest to process, and we're giving it away to a government whose whole goal is to displace us on the global stage and crush us.
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The Chinese will be cruel masters when they run the world. They're not like us at all. By the way, that country, China, also happens to be longtime business partner of the Biden family. Now a functioning Congress would investigate this immediately. The last president was impeached for what? Having a phone call with some corrupt Ukrainian politician. But no, they can't be bothered. They're still yelping about "January 6 was an insurrection." They're trying to ban your hunting rifle. So, the White House is able to ignore the whole thing. Here's Joe Biden's glass ceiling-breaking publicist just yesterday.
REPORTER: There's a Reuters report out this morning that says that more than 5 million barrels of oil that were released from the emergency oil reserves were exported to Europe and Asia last month and some of it reportedly was actually heading to China. Is the administration aware of those reports? And, you know, does the president mind that some of this oil, that was meant to ease the pain for consumers is headed overseas?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: I have not seen that report. So, I would honestly have to go look into it and see what the truth is in that statement that you just laid out and see exactly what's happening. I just have not seen that report.
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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Monday, June 13, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
How can someone that dumb be that arrogant or is there actually a connection between dumbness and arrogance? Probably so. But if someone asks you in the White House briefing, "Oh, by the way, is the U.S. government selling our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to our main enemy in the middle of a gas shortage?" you probably should have an answer, or at least seem embarrassed that you don't. It's a very simple question. Why does customs data show that we are sending millions of barrels of oil to China? Huh? It's been 24 hours since that briefing. We still don't have an answer and of course, that tells you what's really going on here.
This is not a mistake. It's intentional. As if to make that as obvious as possible, over the weekend, Joe Biden's communications staff tweeted this out under his name: "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." What is it like nationalizing the gas stations?
So, he's attacking small businesses in the United States. Running a gas station is not a profitable gig. It's not like running Apple or being a private equity baron or doing any of the things that Joe Biden's donors do. It's not like being Nancy Pelosi who somehow got super rich. How did that happen? No, it's a small business. So, he's blaming them as he sells our national assets to our enemies. So, no one with a basic understanding of economics can pretend to justify what that tweet says. It's just too stupid. Even CNN wouldn't swallow it. Watch.
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HOST: Christine, it's like there's a bad smell in the room and the president is just pointing to the dog.
CHRISTINE ROMANS: Yeah. I mean, look, this is a real problem for the White House because people put gas in their car all the time and they're feeling, feeling this pain. They say there's so many factors at play. It's not like you can just lower the price of gas, you know, with waving a magic wand and the president was talking about the people who sell the gas. The 145,000 gas stations are independently owned. They're small businesses, essentially, and they have higher margins on their candy bars that they sell than they do on their gas.
Well, exactly and that's literally true. They make more than a Snickers bar on a percentage basis than they do from a gallon of diesel fuel, but we may be blaming the wrong people here. Karine Jean-Pierre, please. She has no idea what's actually going on. She just reads from the binder, barely read whatever. They have to workshop sound bites like "Putin's price hike." All right.
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They're not making any decisions. The people who are making decisions are former Obama staffers like Brian Deese. He runs the National Economic Council. He's Joe Biden's top economic adviser. You can thank him. We should put his picture on the screen more often. On Thursday, he told us accidentally, maybe what's actually going on, why the Biden administration is deliberately sabotaging the United States by crushing our energy supply for the benefit of China. Watch this.
VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN: Well, what do you say to those families who say, "Listen, we can't afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable."
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BIDEN ADVISOR BRIAN DEESE: Well, what I heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes. This is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm.
Yeah. We've got to stand firm. The liberal world order. How's that working for you, by the way? Is there anybody who is happier because of it except for people like that? No. But they don't care because you will own nothing and be happy. What they didn't tell you was that China will own everything, including our oil supply. Wait till they come from the Great Lakes.