When Trump was in the process of getting the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, the media linked his efforts to increases in the price of oil. “Energy industry insiders say Trump’s tough stance on Iran will probably keep oil and gasoline prices higher than they would otherwise be,” CNN’s Matt Egan claimed back in 2018.
But earlier this year, Egan reported that “presidents have limited power to lower gas prices,” in a story headlined “Gas prices are in the danger zone. Biden can’t do much about it.”
Funny how that works, isn’t it? When gas prices go up while a Republican is in the White House, we’re told the president is to blame. But if a Democrat is in the White House, we’re told that “presidents can’t control gas prices.”
Of course, no one argues that Joe Biden can make a phone call to the gas companies and instruct them to decrease their prices, but, as Egan acknowledged back in 2018, presidents can influence the market with their policies.
So let’s state for the record that gas prices have doubled on Joe Biden’s watch, and yes, he is absolutely responsible for that. Not OPEC or Vladimir Putin… Joe Biden.
And this is by design. It’s not accidental. “I want you to look into my eyes. I guarantee you; I guarantee you, we are going to end fossil fuel, and I am not going to cooperate with them,” Biden promised back in September 2019. And the reason you’re paying double for gas that what you were when Biden took office is that he’s followed through on that promise.
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We all know that the first thing Joe Biden did upon taking office was kill the Keystone XL pipeline and issue a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling leases. But there are actually many more things that Biden has done that have contributed to gas prices rising throughout his presidency.
As a recent Republican Study Committee research paper shows, there were at least 81 actions Biden took through late March of this year that contributed to rising gas prices on his watch, sending the average cost of a gallon of gas from $2.39 to over $4.00 in March to now $5.00 in June.
On his first day, in addition to killing the Keystone XL Pipeline, he signed executive orders ending Trump’s Energy Independence Initiatives and directed government agencies to review and rescind Trump-era policies that made the United States energy independent. In addition, Biden pushed for more burdensome emissions regulations and limited domestic energy production, amongst other things. A week later, he announced a moratorium on new oil and gas leases and set a goal of doubling costly and inefficient wind power production by 2025.
Biden’s war on energy has continued unabated throughout his presidency, and gas prices continue to climb. You can review all of these actions here if you’d like, but make no mistake: there’s a reason why you’re seeing stickers of Joe Biden saying “I did that” on gas pumps. It’s because he did.
Under Trump, the United States was producing over 13 million barrels of oil a day, and energy exports exceeded energy imports. Biden inherited a country that was energy independent, thanks to Donald Trump and his small-government approach to energy, and squandered it.
