Biden to Oil Producers: Produce More

Also Biden to oil producers: you can’t drill, though.

The Biden administration plans to block new offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans….

Produce more, but…. This is on top of the existing slow-walking and outright sitting on the myriad permits required to act on existing leases.

Oh, wait….

The proposal released by the Interior Department on Friday evening would allow as many as 11 oil lease sales for offshore drilling over the course of five years.

As many as 11 of them—a couple a year over those five years. Never mind that Biden’s administration cannot be trusted to grant the permits required for those leases to have a chance.

Never mind that it takes years, once the permits are granted, to drill a producing well, or that not all drilling will result in a producing well.

Never mind that the Biden administration cannot be trusted to not cancel those leases later in the name of its drive to the Liberal World Order.

Never mind that even if all five of those years are available to production, they’re not enough for the oil producers to recoup the costs of the exploration and subsequent drilling for effect.

That’s the duplicity of President Joe Biden (D) in his cynical pretense to be “doing everything he can” to reduce the cost of gasoline at the pump and of energy generally.

Inflation and Putin’s War on Ukraine

Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank President, said she plans on raising interest rates only gradually, while acknowledging that the EU’s inflation problem was steadily getting worse.

Speaking at the ECB’s annual economic policy conference in Portugal on Tuesday, Ms Lagarde said Europe’s inflation problem was deepening, but warned that the region also faced weaker growth prospects related to the war in Ukraine.

And

The ECB’s gradualism, as Ms Lagarde described its approach, reflects the larger economic blow that the war in Ukraine has dealt to Europe….

President Joe Biden (D) also (in)famously blames Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for the high inflation in the US.

I wonder if accelerating the shipment of arms and ammunition; accelerating, in particular, the shipment of tanks, artillery, rocket artillery, antiship and antiaircraft weapons; and getting out of the way of transferring combat aircraft (all with associated training and logistics) to Ukraine might then eliminate that inflation cause and boost economic growth by helping Ukraine quickly to win the war inflicted on it.

Federal Abortion Clinics

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has is pushing an idea from the Progressive-Democratic Party center:

We have some ideas coming from Senator Warren’s signed letter along with 25 other Democratic senators asking President Biden to explore opening health care clinics on federal lands in red states in order to help people access the health care and abortion. Services that they need.

…explore just how much we can start using federal lands as a way to protect people who need access to abortions in all the states that either have banned abortions or are clearly on the threshold of doing so.

Paid for with what funds? This is just another attempt by the Progressive-Democratic Party to have us American taxpayers pay for abortions. It’s yet one more reason we citizens need to get out, vote, and elect majorities to both the House and the Senate and to the State legislatures and to the city and town governances. And to turn the Progressive-Democrat out of the White House in 2024.

Oil Price Caps

The G-7 is floating a new sanction against Russia in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That sanction centers on capping the price nations would pay for Russian oil.

The Group of Seven leaders are expected to agree to start work on a mechanism to cap the purchase price of Russian oil….
Leaders will direct relevant ministers in their countries to work on the details of Russian oil caps, which would create a buyers’ cartel of Western nations and their allies, the official said.

To the extent such a cap would have a material effect on Putin’s economy, or more importantly on Putin’s war (how many battalions have the current sanctions forced Putin to withdraw from Ukraine?), and I’m not convinced a cap would have any material effect, I suggest a cap with which to begin would be the deeply discounted price at which Putin already is selling his oil to India and the People’s Republic of China.

On the other hand, though, there’s likely not much urgency to this virtue-signaling move:

There is no timeline yet on when the details will be worked out.

No, He’s Not

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.

Oil is a global market, and until January 2021, not only was the US a major player in its production, we were a net exporter of oil (and of natural gas) and essentially energy independent.

However, acting on his campaign promise to eliminate the oil and natural gas industries, Biden canceled a major oil pipeline project that would have fed refineries producing (among other things) gasoline, imposed regulations that made it difficult to build other pipelines, stopped issuing oil and gas leases on Federal lands and waters, outright canceled leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, is sitting on thousands of permits necessary to act on remaining leases, and generally inhibited our ability to produce oil and natural gas.

The Biden administration policies also (deliberately, I say) make oil and natural gas and gasoline companies reluctant to build or even to reopen additional refineries, much less restart or drill new oil and natural gas wells so those potential refineries would have something to refine.

The Biden-Granholm reduction in the supply of American oil—and so their reduction in the global supply of oil—is what’s responsible for today’s high gasoline prices.

Biden alone can, indeed, impact the cost of energy to us Americans. He’s already done it negatively. He could just as easily (or maybe not—there’s a serious trust problem now) impact the cost positively by getting his administration out of the way of the American energy industry.

And that’s just for starters.

Both Biden and Granholm know this full well; they know that Biden absolutely is not doing everything he can to reduce prices for American families. Not for gasoline, not for energy generally, and not for any of the inflationary forces in our economy.