Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm—who thinks it’s laugh out loud hilarious that the Biden administration could impact the cost of energy to us Americans—made the patently erroneous claim that President Joe Biden (D) is doing everything he can to reduce [gasoline] prices for American families.

Oil is a global market, and so Biden is helpless alone?

High school economics: increase the supply of something relative to demand for it, and prices for that something come down. Conversely, reducing supply relative to demand drives up the price.

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.

President Joe Biden (D) wants half the new cars sold in the US to be electric, and he wants and 500,000 new charging stations for them, both by 2030. He considers reliable EV charging stations to be critical to getting us switched over to battery cars.

Charging stations are necessary (assuming the switchover itself is necessary; it’s not, but that’s a separate story), but they’re far from sufficient. The important thing here is reliable electricity running to each charging station—electricity from the grid. But that requires hydrocarbon-powered electricity generating plants, and it requires the electric grid, itself barely able to handle current loads—see the rolling blackouts that are routine in California and that have become a risk in Texas—to be upgraded to handle the vastly increased loads imposed by all those battery-powered vehicles, whether charged at the charging stations or in the home garage.

The Biden-Harris administration wants our oil companies to produce more because energy prices are too damn high. Never mind that it’s Biden-Harris policies that have crippled American oil and natural gas production and driven those prices so much higher.

The Biden administration says that oil companies face no government constraints on drilling more in the short run, even as it presses the companies to shift long term to cleaner forms of energy in response to climate change.

Which is a complete lie.  Then we get this from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, via her spokesman: