Energy Insanity
Biden finally decided to get with the program and ban Russian oil imports. Since this oil gets used, rather than stuffed into a piggy bank, it has to be sourced from elsewhere. Joe has indicated that he's hoping to go, hat in hand, to the Saudis and to Venezuela... but not to reverse the domestic energy policy that has curtailed North American production.
His mouthpiece, an embodiment of the old joke about how you can tell if a politician is lying, coughed up a deflection for the ages when questioned about this stubbornness.
Q: We also know, you know, the President, as recently as yesterday, talked about increasing domestic manufacturing to bring down prices on inflated items like goods. So why not apply the same logic to energy and increase domestic production here?
MS. PSAKI: Well, there are 9,000 approved oil leases that the oil companies are not tapping into currently. So I would ask them that question.
Sounds like quite the "gotcha," doesn't it?
Note the sleight of hand. Psaki said "leases," expecting that most people won't know what that really means.
As Judge Andrew Napolitano explains, a lease is not a productive well, nor even the promise of one. A lease is a granting of permission to an oil company to gamble its own time and money on drilling a well. If the well doesn't produce, the company incurs the loss. Much more depth on the nature of Psaki's non sequitur here, here, and here.
The reality is that the Biden Administration has, in its first year, erected substantial new obstacles to domestic oil and gas production, in an effort to coercively shift the nation's energy economy toward wind and solar generation. That this is pointless is an argument I've made more times than I can count, given that much of the world will not follow suit and that brute-force decarbonization will require global compliance to be effective. That this is even more obviously pointless given the global events of the past couple weeks was presented on these pages at the outset.
People were raging at the sharp increase in gas prices before Putin's invasion, and the disruption he caused is causing those prices to skyrocket. Yet, rather than recognize reality, understand that high gas prices hurt most Americans and damage the economy, and accept the futility of this WASABI energy policy, Biden has Psaki lying by non-sequitur about his obstinacy.
I repeat: All this "green" energy policy will make not one whit of difference re global warming. China will not follow suit. Nor will India. That's a third of the world, with hundreds of millions just now getting a fraction of the energy lifestyle we've been living for decades. Add Africa's 15% of the world population, and before you even get to the balance of Asia, to South America, or to Russia herself, you have enough "math" to realize that all our carbon reductions, even if the stated goals are achievable (they are not), will be mooted by those populations' rise out of poverty.
So, why won't Biden drill? Apart from simple obstinacy, and perhaps a desire to fulfill his former boss’s promise, he and the rest of his party have put themselves in thrall to the Greens. Many of whom are humanity-hating fanatics who've no problem with witnessing the unwashed masses suffer substantial degradation of their living standards, or a mass die-off of poor brown, black, and yellow people on the other side of the world.
That's the hard truth. The party in charge, the people who claim to care more about the poor than the other team... no wait... the people who claim they are the only ones who care about the poor, has given itself over to fanatics and absolutists who don’t.