Way back in 2015, Foreign Policy magazine dubbed the Obama administration’s foreign policy, “Operation Charlie Foxtrot”.
By which it meant that Barack Obama’s “strategic incoherence” was a “cluster-fuck” of “bad choices, mismanagement, and faulty diplomacy”. G. W. Bush was bad enough, the august publication wrote, but Obama was, unbelievably, even worse. “An egregious failure.”
“Incoherence”? “Failure”? Change my Depends, says Joe Biden.
Just when you thought President Joe Biden couldn’t screw up U.S. energy policy any worse, his cabinet rises to the occasion.
The Biden administration wants to curb – and potentially ban outright – U.S. exports of oil and refined products. Such a decision would do little to tame soaring consumer fuel prices and could cause them to remain inflated for longer […]
Gas prices have set almost daily records, closing in on a national average of $5 a gallon since Biden took office in January 2021. Diesel prices are even worse, averaging $5.60 a gallon nationwide.
Biden’s energy policies are so damnable that even CNN’s Jake Tapper was forced to call bullshit on Biden’s Director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese. When Deese tried to blame skyrocketing fuel prices on Vladimir Putin, not even Dem fanboi Tapper was buying it. “Not all of it,” Tapper retorted. “Not all of it. Some of it, yes.”
The White House has gone out of its way to blame soaring energy prices on the war in Ukraine, calling it “Putin’s price hike.” But the reality is that energy prices were already surging before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
Biden has already tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve more than any previous president, drawing down the nation’s emergency stockpile by roughly 1 million barrels a day, only to see crude prices march to over $120 a barrel.
So, if it’s not Putin, then what is it?
The same reason that Australia, with its massive natural gas fields, is experiencing a catastrophic shortage of gas: decades of political mismanagement, on both sides of politics, have made it easier and far more lucrative to export nearly all our gas.
Following its historic shift to being a net exporter of petroleum in 2020, the United States has continued to export more petroleum – which includes oil, refined petroleum products, and other liquids – than it imports, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Energy Information Administration.
So, why isn’t banning exports the solution?
There is ample evidence that reimposing export ban would negatively impact the domestic and global economy.
In January, the Dallas Federal Reserve released a study on the potential impacts of a crude oil export ban, looking into its consequences on global energy prices and how this would impact American consumers. The study concluded that a cessation of U.S. exports “would lower the supply of oil in global markets and raise its price” and that “one would expect global fuel prices, if anything, to increase as a result.”
Banning exports would also be detrimental to our European allies, who are paying even higher prices than Americans as they cut their reliance on Russian supplies […]
And Europe’s reliance on U.S. energy supply will only increase as the EU implements its formal embargo on Russian oil in the coming months.
This is an entirely foreseeable problem of Europe’s own making. They were warned that their idiotic pursuit of climate chimaeras was leaving their energy infrastructure critically vulnerable. Making it worse is that the administration in charge of their would-be saviour clearly has no idea of how global energy markets work.
Secretary Granholm raised eyebrows last year when she admitted not knowing how much oil Americans consume daily. Banning exports in an environment of rising demand and limited global supply would put the administration’s ignorance on a whole new level […]
Keeping at home the roughly 3.5 million barrels of refined products a day that the United States currently exports would do little to lower prices at the corner gas station. U.S. refiners are already processing as much light, sweet crude from America’s shale basins as possible. Eliminating exports would lower crude output and jack up global crude prices – which account for 60 percent of retail pump prices for gasoline and diesel.
Forbes
Climate policies are making a wicked problem exponentially worse. Increased demand for gas for power generation is creating a shortage of fertilisers manufactured from natural gas. Climate activists are shutting down oil pipeline developments: Biden’s first act as president was shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, as part of re-signing onto the Paris Climate Accords. Demand for gas and oil is increasing in no small part due to wind and solar destabilising grids and falling short during peak demand in winter: leading to the astonishing sight of oil-and-gas-rich Texas experiencing widespread blackouts during winter snowstorms.
This is the world the climate cultists are building — and it sucks.
