Biden's energy fiasco

 National Review:

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In past attempts to seem like he’s doing something about the problem, Biden has ordered releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, pushed electric vehicles, and invoked the Defense Production Act to produce more renewable-energy components. As anyone could have predicted, gas prices were unaffected by those actions.

So now he’s just firing off notes to energy CEOs on White House letterhead threatening them with government action if they don’t do what he wants.

“Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis and respect the critical equities of energy workers and fence-line communities,” Biden wrote.

First of all, no, they don’t. No company in the United States needs to work with any presidential administration on anything if it does not want to. This remains a free country, and loyalty to politicians is not a prerequisite to doing business.

Second, it’s almost sad that Biden can’t get through a threat without genuflecting to his woke, environmentalist base. Whatever “critical equities” are, we’re pretty sure they aren’t part of the refining process.

As for “fence-line communities,” environmentalist activism is one of the reasons for declining refinery capacity in the U.S. In 2019, the largest refinery on the East Coast shut down permanently after a fire. Its closure was hailed as a victory for “environmental justice” as it was located near an African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia.

There’s a case to be made that refineries, which produce unavoidable and harmful pollution, should not be built too close to densely populated areas regardless. But if companies try to build in less populated areas, the wildlife activists, in concert with environmental bureaucrats at all levels of government, are there to block them.

Since refineries can’t be built in places where people live, and they can’t be built in places where people don’t live, they simply don’t get built. And no large refinery has, since 1976. The last time a large refinery was built in America, Rocky was the top-grossing movie, the Eagles’ Hotel California was the top-selling album, and Joe Biden was only in his first term as a senator.

By and large, energy companies don’t even try to build new refineries. An attempt in 2005 to build a refinery in a remote part of Arizona failed. And Biden isn’t helping. As the Institute for Energy Research finds in a recent article, “New refineries are unlikely to be built in the United States due to daunting environmental standards and policies that the Biden administration has been implementing to reduce petroleum product consumption in the future.” Building a new refinery costs billions of dollars and takes years. For that investment to yield a decent return, domestic demand for gas and for diesel will have to be strong for quite some time to come, but unless there is something we have missed, that’s not the fossil future that Biden has in mind.

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The biggest problem for increasing refinery capacity is Biden's climate kook agenda.  He is at war with the petrochemical industry yet demanding things that make it harder for them to produce.  It will take a few years to remove Biden from office and reduce his damage to the US economy.

See, also:

The Audacity of This New Gas Lie From the Biden Team Is Something to Behold

 

During his remarks on Wednesday calling for a gas tax holiday, Joe Biden lied about multiple things, most notably blaming the rise in gas prices on Vladimir Putin. But as we noted, a gas tax holiday is in the words of Barack Obama a “gimmick” and the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “showbiz.” Some of the estimates of the savings that you would get — even if it was passed along to you — show how silly this whole exercise is.

So if you have an average car, maybe you top out at $30 over 12 weeks — and again, that’s assuming all the gas tax savings were passed along to you. This is a bit like when they bragged about the 16 cents you would save last year on your July 4 cookout on a few items, while driving up prices on everything else. I hope the $30 over three months makes up for the $460 more a month Biden’s inflation is costing you.

Then what happens after three months when you have to raise it again? How about when it drives inflation up because it increases the demand? And you’re not bringing the true price down by increasing the supply? It’s foolhardy.

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So Biden reduces the supply of oil and gas, causing the price to double, and then proposes to give you a few cents back with a tax holiday. 

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