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.

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.

Also necessary, but not sufficient even in concert with the above, is an adequate definition of “fast charging.” If a battery-powered vehicle cannot be charged to the 400-mile range of a full gasoline tank in substantially the same 5 minutes it takes to “charge” that gasoline tank to an internal combustion engine-powered car to a 400-mile range, the battery-powered vehicle will remain impractical.

The true Critical Items, then, are at the origin and near-origin: deregulating domestic oil and natural gas production and deregulated electricity generation so there will be energy to put onto that upgraded grid.