“”Even amid the pandemic, companies in the United States pumped more oil during my first year in office than they did during my predecessor’s first year.”
-Joe Biden, Tuesday, June 21, 2022
This, campers, is what we call a lie of omission. It’s an oft-heard one from the hapless Biden Administration, uttered by the President and other political hacks in the forlorn hope that there are still Americans stupid enough to give them any credence. Or perhaps not so forlorn since according to polls around 24% of our fellow citizens are still willing to swallow this administration’s outlandish excuses. So it bears addressing.
First, who preceded the Trump Administration? Wrack your brains to remember. Hopefully you will recall that the Obama Administration was not that wild on fossil fuel, and that after climbing to a high of around 9,600 million barrels per day by January of 2015, oil production had declined to around nine MB/D when Trump took office. Production accelerated dramatically thereafter.
In fact, according to the US Energy Information Agency figures at https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCRFPUS2&f=W, there’s a worse tale to tell about Joe. This year’s production through first week in June topped out at about 11.9 million barrels/day. That amount was exceeded each and every week from February 15, 2019 to April 24 of 2020, when it declined sharply due to the shutdown of the economy for COVID. So Joe’s figures were actually juiced by the inertia of production in the Trump years.
EIA figures also show us that the lowest point for oil and gas production was February of 2021, immediately after the first of Joe’s continuing actions against fossil fuels. Contrast that to the man he served as vice-president, who spoke in his 2013 State of the Union address about an “all-of-the-above” energy plan that would “keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits” while also promoting renewable energy. He also proposed “…an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good,” using some oil and gas revenues from public lands. And yes, he even okayed the first phase of the Keystone XL pipeline. Oil and gas production rose considerably in Obama’s presidency.
Perhaps he understood what Joe was too blockheaded to ever get: that if you declare war on an industrial sector; limit its ability to grow through regulations at all levels; call for its financiers to be made pariahs; accuse its leaders of overweening greed; threaten to drag its mangers before Congress; make limiting and punishing said sector and its operators your first order of business upon becoming president; well… Let’s just say that industry is not going to be eager to come to your rescue when you’ve screwed the economy up as badly as you have at this point. Better to have taken the “all of above” route and let market forces, not political hacks, pick winners. But then, we all ought to remember Barack Obama’s warning to a fellow Democrat during the 2020 primary season: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Joe now leads an administration that looks and acts like the hostage taker who threatens to start shooting people if reality doesn’t start bending his way, and quickly. Those of us with our wits about us know how these situations usually end, which is depressing. Because in this case, the American people are the hostages and the gang is led by a guy with a very tenuous grasp on fact.
Pray for us all, and vote in November as if your life depended on it. Because it might.
