With apologies to Stanley Kubrick, the Biden administration has ordered, "Gentlemen, you can't drill in here! This an oil field!"
It's something of a Democrat tradition, going at least back to Bill Clinton's graceless exit from the White House in 2001, to plant land mines and set booby traps for the incoming Republican president. Clinton, during his final days in office, issued an environmental diktat ordering an expensive and unnecessary 80% reduction in the allowable arsenic levels in our drinking water. The previous allowance was already infinitesimal, so George W Bush wisely undid Clinton's diktat.
But the press got to run headlines like "Bush Undoes Clinton Environmental Rules" and poison the well of public opinion just as the new GOP administration was getting started.
The latest news from Biden-Harris might not quite fit the booby trap label because whether the next president is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, somebody is going to have to pay for Biden's malign neglect of this country's oil and gas production leases.
(The difference is that a Trump administration will take the blame for Biden's actions but a Harris administration won't mind — and the press will cheer her along because she's saving the environment or whatever.)
This is from Kevin Killough's report for Just the News:
Energy expert Alex Epstein, author of “Fossil Future,” argued at a recent House Budget Committee hearing the United States' record-high oil production is in spite of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, not because of them. The data suggests he could be right, which means the impacts of the administration’s energy policies will be seen in the next four years.
"The only lease sale in 2022 was a bit of acreage offered in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and it resulted in a single bid."
The report also states that Biden-Harris would have allowed zero lease sales in 2023, too, except for a requirement in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (inserted by former Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin) "that prohibited the department from issuing offshore wind leases without also offering ones for offshore oil and gas." The provision had to be enforced by a federal judge because Biden-Harris tried to sidestep it.
Oil and gas exploration has been on the decline in the U.S. since 2014, in part because so much had been found and there's only so much even our remarkable frackers and drillers can exploit. But the decline accelerated under Biden-Harris as part of their forced march to "clean" energy.
(Clean is in scare quotes because "clean" energy isn't clean.)
Given the time lag between exploration and exploitation, or lease sales and drilling, I'm assuming the next administration will face an energy supply issue. Maybe the only real question is how serious it becomes — very serious if a Harris administration continues with Biden's policies and less so under Trump 47.
That's all by design. Today's Democrat leaders are in total thrall to the grifters and True Believers of the green movement, but it's us who get to pay.
On the one hand, it would serve Harris right if she wins in November and it's her administration that gets stuck with all the messes left behind by the lame-duck Biden crew. On the other hand, I'd like to spend the next four years being able to afford to put gas in my car and not getting mired in the Third World War.
So let's give a cheer for not letting petty vindictiveness get in the way of restoring some health to the Republic. But I digress.
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