President Joe Biden is in a bit of a pickle.
On the one hand, voters have a well-established history of punishing presidents and their political parties when the price of gas goes up. On the other hand, Biden and his climate-alarmist allies actually do want the price of gas to go up.
The trick is to figure out ways to both force the price of gas to go higher while also making it seem like you are doing the opposite. That is exactly what Biden tried to do last week when he released 50 million gallons from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on Tuesday, only to turn around and raise fees on domestic energy producers on Friday.
Few consumers probably heard about the 18-page Interior Department report that recommended raising the fees energy developers pay the federal government to drill on federal lands. That was by design. Unlike Tuesday, when Biden gave a highly promoted speech trumpeting his decision to use the strategic oil reserve to increase supply and lower oil prices, Friday’s fee recommendation was part of a holiday news dump.
This is not the first time Biden has acted to raise the cost of domestic oil production. On his first day in office, Biden ended construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and banned new energy leases on federal lands. When the price of gasoline quickly shot up, Biden pathetically went to OPEC begging them to increase their oil production. They politely declined. Gas prices continued to rise.
When Biden took office, the United States had become a net exporter of petroleum products, a remarkable public policy achievement for a nation that had been dependent on foreign oil production for so long. But Biden quickly gave away that economic and strategic advantage. For Biden and his environmental extremist allies, consumers must be made to suffer for their fossil fuel consumption sins.
No matter what the economic or national security cost, Democrats honestly believe that climate change is the greatest threat the country faces today. By this flawed reasoning, no price is too high to reduce America’s carbon emissions, even if that pain, in the case of gas prices, is disproportionately borne by the poorest.
And, yes, the pain is the point. The zeal of the environmental extremists is such that they view it as retribution for moral shortcomings.
The U.S. will absolutely have to adjust as the climate gets warmer. There are policy changes that could make that adjustment easier and more equitable. For example, the U.S. could stop subsidizing million-dollar homes built in areas that are prone to hurricane and flood damage.
But what the government should absolutely not do is sacrifice the nation’s ability to produce energy cheaply and efficiently here at home.
