From the moment Joe Biden took office, he waged a war on oil and gas. Like his former boss, Barack Obama, Biden wants to enrich his supporters in the green energy sector at the expense of normal Americans.
And a huge expense it has been. Gas prices have been ballooning throughout Biden’s presidency, nearly doubling since he took office. His efforts to pin the blame for rising gas prices and inflation on Vladimir Putin haven’t worked, and now he’s in panic mode. Nothing motivates voters more than their wallets (remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?), and if Biden can’t get gas prices under control, his party faces a “biblical disaster” in November — likely thwarting his agenda for the remainder of his already feeble presidency.
He’s raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserves twice. The first time was such a whopping success that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) was quick to pounce on a two-cent drop in the average price of a gallon of gas a week later, crediting Joe Biden for the tremendous relief at the pump.
The current national average gas price is still over $4 per gallon, and so Biden has calculated that it’s time to thumb his nose at the radical environmentalist agenda. Earlier this week, he announced he would temporarily allow 15% ethanol (E15) blend gas during the summer months. Gasoline with 15% ethanol has been banned for nearly a decade during the summer months under the Clean Air Act because warm weather increases the risk of smog.
But Biden wasn’t finished. On Friday, he announced that he would allow more drilling on federal lands — despite months of favoring energy imports from other nations, including Russia.
The Biden administration clearly sees that high prices aren’t just hurting the American people, they’re hurting the Democrats’ chances of holding onto power. And Biden will do anything, even going back on his radical climate agenda, to boost his poll numbers.
But Biden’s latest efforts are all for show and aren’t likely to ease the pain at the pump.
According to the Department of Energy, there are only about 2,300 gas stations nationwide that can even offer E15 gas, out of the over 150,000 total gas stations nationwide. So Biden’s waiver on E15 is going to have less impact on gas prices than his administration is willing to acknowledge. And that’s before we even consider the fact that ethanol-rich gas has inferior fuel efficiency and contributes to engine damage.
As for Biden’s latest move on drilling, as my PJM colleague Rick Moran notes, it’s merely a “political stunt by Biden to assure the American people that he’s not really a green nutcase who wants you and your family to freeze to death in winter.” His move has triggered the environmentalists in his party, but, as Rick explains, it won’t actually contribute to lower gas prices.
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Biden’s recent moves are nevertheless a revealing mea culpa on Biden’s part. He’s conceding that his policies thus far have increased gas prices, and that to appear proactive he has to buck the environmental lobby. Biden has revealed that for all the doomsday predictions about catastrophic climate change, those concerns aren’t as important as his poll numbers.
The far left constantly tells us how little time we have remaining to save the environment from irreversible damage. Biden’s latest moves, regardless of their impact on gas prices, prove that the apocalyptic predictions embraced by the Democratic Party are mere scare tactics, that the threat of rising sea levels and drastic changes in temperature aren’t nearly as important as the next election.
