https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-27-complete-madness-in-the-biden-administration-energy-policy
Is President Biden doing anything right? To this observer, his policies range from at best merely incompetent, to at worst malicious hatred of the country and people whose interests he was elected to advance. Somewhere in between those two extremes we have Biden’s energy policy. In this arena, appropriate adjectives would be inconsistent, incoherent, and destructive. Don’t even attempt to make sense of it. To summarize in one word, it is complete madness.
I’m old enough to remember the 1970s, and the two “oil shocks” that occurred during that decade. A brief summary of the history can be found in this 2012 piece from Foreign Policy. By 1970/71, U.S. oil production had peaked and begun to decline. 1973 brought the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and OPEC halted oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. By January 1974, crude oil prices on the world markets had “more than quadrupled” (from around $3 to $12 per barrel). Further constraints on supply in the late 70s, most notably a big drop in supply from Iran following the ouster of the Shah, were followed by a further tripling of the price, this time from about $12 to about $36 per barrel. Government efforts at price controls were largely unsuccessful at restraining prices at the pump, but did cause shortages and lines at gas stations that maddened consumers. Without adequate domestic oil supply, the U.S. became a supplicant to the big international exporters, mainly OPEC and Russia. As reported in that Foreign Policy piece, President Carter reacted by “mak[ing] energy independence the central ambition of his presidency.”
Energy independence was a bi-partisan goal of American Presidents and of the Congress, until President Obama came along. Obama had the opposite strategy. He had drunk the climate Kool-Aid, and thought that the right goals were to restrict the production of fossil fuel energy, which would cause prices to rise and thereby restrict consumption. The famous quote from Obama, uttered in 2008 during his first presidential campaign, was “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.” Although that statement specifically dealt with electricity prices, the same principle would apply as well to all energy prices. And Obama sought to put his strategy into practice, both by putting proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation before Congress, and by attempting to use his executive powers to restrict domestic fossil fuel development. However, the cap-and-trade legislation failed in Congress, and domestic “frackers” worked around Obama’s federal restrictions to greatly expand U.S. domestic oil and gas production, mostly on private lands.
