Tucker Carlson: The US is about to run out of diesel fuel
Fox News host Tucker Carlson weighs in on the energy crisis stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
There are a lot of faraway places in this world—Namibia for example— but Europe is not one of them. Europe is where your kids spent junior year abroad. Europe is an easy flight from the east coast of the United States to pretty much anywhere on the continent and you know this. You've been on vacation in Europe, as millions of Americans have. For the most part, they speak English in Europe. They've got Starbucks and Taco Bell and air conditioning and modern hospitals. It is not another world.
Given how closely related the United States is to Europe and has always been, you would imagine our leaders would notice when Europe began to fall apart, especially when the signs were not subtle at all – and they weren't. This summer, Germans began clear-cutting ancient forests to heat their homes. In Poland, families queued up for hours to buy coal, just like they did 150 years ago. In the U.K., the government projected that more than 10,000 Britons will freeze to death, will die, this winter for lack of heating fuel—freeze to death in England! That is not supposed to happen in a first world country.
Europe is moving backward at high speed and it's not clear where it will end. The question is: why is this happening? The answer for once is a very simple one: the war in Ukraine. That's why it's happening. A huge percentage of Europe's energy came from Russia. Those imports have now been banned, supposedly to punish Vladimir Putin. What's the result of this punishment? Well, the Russian ruble is now far stronger than it was a year ago. The European economy, meanwhile, is collapsing. Europeans are much poorer than they were when the war in Ukraine started.
How is that a victory for Europe, the West and democracy? Well, that's a fair question. It's an obvious question, but no one in Washington appears to be asking that question. Instead, the Biden administration is doubling down on the self-destructive mistakes that are destroying the European Union.
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The White House banned Russian oil, natural gas and coal. It was our moral duty. Then at the same time, the Biden administration crushed domestic oil production here by canceling oil and gas leases and then, as if that wasn't enough, the Biden administration sold a piece of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, maybe this country's most important resource, to China. None of this hurt Putin in any way. All of it impoverishes the United States.
Vladimir Putin delivers an address flanked by men in military uniforms. (AP) (Pavel Bednyakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
What could possibly be the justification for doing that? We've wondered. Anyone who's paying attention has had to have wondered that. Well, this week, Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, of Bethesda. answered that question. Russia is an orthodox Christian country with traditional social values and for that reason, it must be destroyed, no matter what the cost to us. This is not a conventional war. This is a jihad. Jamie Raskin said that out loud, but many in Washington agree with him in both parties. They would like to see World War Trans immediately.
What is a jihad going to mean for you? The details are stunning. Thanks to the Biden administration's religious war in Ukraine, this country is about to run out of diesel fuel. According to data from the Energy Information Administration by the Monday of Thanksgiving week, (that's 25 days from now), there will be no more diesel. What's going to happen then? Well, everything will stop. That means trucks and trains and barges all unable to move.
Farm equipment will shut down. There will be no deliveries because there'll be no trucks. There'll be no diesel generators and then inevitably, our economy will crash because everything runs on diesel fuel—not on solar panels, not on wind farms, on diesel fuel. Diesel is not a negotiable commodity. You have to have diesel.
What happens when we don't have it? Well, yesterday, Fox's Jacqui Heinrich, apparently alone in the White House press corps, asked the White House spokesman, John Kirby, that very question. What's the plan here? We're running out of diesel.
John Kirby, standing at the podium representing the White House, the president of the United States, the administration, the largest organization in human history, the executive branch of government had no answer. But don't worry, he said. We will be exporting plenty of energy to Europe to help fight that progressive crusade in Ukraine. Watch.
JACQUI HEINRICH: What are we doing to increase the supply of diesel given that the Energy Information Administration said as of October 14 the U.S. only had about a 25-day supply. You have the Northeast and New York already rationing home heating oil. What are we doing to prepare for the winter and to ramp up supply of diesel?
JOHN KIRBY: I'll take the question on the diesel, because I just don't have the data on that in front me. So let me take that and we'll get back to you on that, but writ large, the president has been working very, very hard to make sure that we're, that not only are we ready for fluctuations that could come and of course, the prices are going down and we think that's important, but that we are also doing what we can to help our European friends and partners who are also going to be facing a long, cold winter. We have doubled our commitment, the commitment he made in March, for natural gas exports to Europe. We've doubled that commitment in terms of actual getting things over there, getting natural gas over there and we are working with foreign suppliers of natural gas and oil to see if we can't help our European partners diversify their own storage and supplies
Just pause and savor the irony here just for a moment because now everything is irony. They've been telling you for decades since Al Gore left the White House, that the single greatest threat to the world was warming and because of their efforts to fight warming, you are in danger of freezing and unlike warming, freezing actually kills people, a lot of people every year, and it will kill people in the West this year, thanks to their efforts to fight warming.
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The second thing to notice is the White House spokesman's totally uninterested, blasé response to the most basic question anyone could ask, which is "What are we doing about the fact we're running out of diesel fuel?" He has no idea and he's not embarrassed that he has no idea. The problem is at this point, there may not be an answer because there may not be a way to avoid a disaster. Diesel fuel is not just low in this country. It's low in every Western nation that is aligned itself with Ukraine. All these nations preparing for World War Trans are running out of diesel fuel. As New York Magazine has reported, "The last time there was this little supply (of diesel), there were about 3.5 billion fewer people on the planet." Well, that puts it into perspective.
The Biden administration responded, as you know, earlier this year to rising gas prices, which they feared above all, because the midterms are coming in two weeks by tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, but that will not work here. The Northeast home heating oil reserve contains a million barrels of diesel in case of emergencies. The problem is that demand is so high across the board that, according to The Washington Post, even if the Biden administration used every single barrel in that stockpile, that stockpile would be empty in less than six hours.
And of course, it's not just diesel that's running out. Jet fuel is up about 23% in just the last month. Kerosene, which if you don't live in New York City, you know perfectly well, is used to heat people's homes and keep them from dying, is now close to $7 a gallon. Who heats with kerosene, by the way? Poor people heat with kerosene, and they're the ones who can't get it. $7 a gallon! In New England, people are worried about freezing to death this winter. Here's a local Fox report.
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REPORTER: West Hartford homeowner Sharona Resnick-Kravitz has been paying for oil to heat her home for more than 35 years.
SHARONA RESNICK-KRAVITZ: This is New England. It gets cold here. We're cold.
REPORTER: Sharona is a widow living on a fixed income. She says before her husband passed away, they shared the bills. Now she is having to make sacrifices. How are you preparing and trying to figure out what can you sacrifice at this point?
RESNICK-KRAVITZ: Um, food. I go to the grocery store and I'm very frugal about what I buy.
REPORTER: She tells me at a $6 a gallon, buying oil has become a huge burden. The average home uses 800 gallons of oil per year. That's almost $5,000 at the current rate.
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This shouldn't be happening in this of all countries. The United States has some of the deepest – by some measures, the deepest – energy reserves on the planet. It's our main strength. Cheap energy is the reason this is a rich country. That's the reason. That's why we're exceptional, because we have cheap energy and this country was energy independent a few years ago.
Now, if you want to fix the economy, you would make this country energy independent once again. You would bring back cheap energy. That will fix the economy quicker than anything else. That's the only thing that'll fix the economy. But the Biden administration, for whatever reason, has done the opposite — depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for example. They just released another 15 million barrels the other day.
Because they know that's running out, the White House is also begging foreign governments for help in the most humiliating possible way. Biden just went and begged the Saudis in secret for more oil. As the New York Times reported this week by his top aides, "thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year."
But then the Saudi royal family decided not to go along with it. They're not ramping up their oil production. They're doing the opposite. Saudi's oil minister is now telling the West to brace for energy shortages. Watch this.
PRINCE ABDULAZIZ BIN SALMAN, SAUDI ARABIA’S OIL MINISTER: It is my profound duty to make it clear to the world that losing emergency stock may become painful in the months to come.
An energy shortage is not really a debate over whether some dude should be on the girls’ swim team. This is adult stuff. Countries rise and fall on the basis of what energy costs and when there's a real energy shortage, things fall apart. People die. Economies collapse. Poverty sets in, systemic poverty, not just in the bad part of town, but in your part of town. This is a real thing.
The problem is the people running the government are children. They not only can't admit what they've done wrong, they don't even understand it. Here's Karine Jean-Pierre, the glass ceiling shattering spokeswoman at the White House, addressing the question yesterday.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN: I'm anxious to get your thoughts on this New York Times report that U.S. officials thought they had a deal with the Saudis before the president went to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia for his meeting with the crown prince, but they thought they had a deal on oil supplies and oil, price of oil, but that the Saudis backed out of that deal. What can you tell us about?
KARIN JEAN-PIERRE: So, we have been very clear about how we believe parts of that report was mischaracterized and there has been some changes that have been made to that report. Look, we've also been clear that our trip, that the president's trip to the Middle East, was not about oil.
BLITZER: Was there an understanding, Karine, with the Saudis that the Saudis then backed away from?
JEAN-PIERRE: Again, the trip was not about oil.
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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Friday, Sept. 16, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
This is embarrassing. She can't even conjugate the verb correctly. This is the spokesperson. It's a joke. She's doesn't know what oil is and she's lying. They're all like that. These people are not capable of running a country this big and this complex and that's why it's falling apart. Joe Biden is blaming gas stations for high prices. How's Kamala Harris responding to all of this? Well, she's responding to diesel shortage by telling you diesel is bad. Watch.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I have a particular fondness, I must tell you, for electric school buses. I love electric school buses. On a daily basis, 25 million children in our country every day go to school on those diesel fueled school busses and hundreds, thousands of school bus drivers are driving those buses, which are then these people, these children, these adults are inhaling what is toxic air.
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The lady who never had children is lecturing you about children. The person has never had a real job is lecturing you about energy policy. The woman who told you masks would stop COVID is telling you about diesel fumes and their effect on your body.
This is a joke. The truth is these people are bumping right smack up against reality and here's the reality. We have 25 days to avert economic catastrophe. Catastrophe is what will happen if we run out of diesel fuel. That's more important than prosecuting a jihad in Ukraine. It's more important than World War Trans.
Everything depends on this, and we've got 25 days to fix it.