In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed centered on the high and rising cost of fuel and the deleterious effect that’s having on our businesses and our economy, Collin Eaton, David Harrison, and Doug Cameron had this remark:

The administration has also tried cajoling US oil companies into increasing production, but few have chosen to do so, instead sticking to leaner budgets urged by investors.

That’s laid off to the maxed out refineries in the US, so there’d be no place to ship increased production, anyway. That’s a player, certainly, but it’s a relatively minor one.

The far more important factor, and it plays to refiners, also is this. Drilling new wells and reopening closed wells each costs lots of money, and it takes years to recoup those costs. It’s the same for the pipelines and other transports used to get the oil and natural gas to refiners, and it’s the same for the refiners.

The Biden administration, though, cannot be trusted not to pull the rug out from under anyone in the oil and gas industry before those costs have been recouped.

There’s no reason, then, for refiners to (re)expand their capacity, even were there product ready for refinement. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are actively blocking the construction of additional pipelines with which to transport increased production. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are constantly promising to put the remaining hydrocarbon energy producers—oil and natural gas producers—out of business. This is a plain extension of what Biden’s favorite bud and predecessor ex-President Barack Obama promised to do to the coal producers and largely succeeded in doing.