Will rising oil and gas prices ultimately just benefit the fossil fuel industry, or will it move us toward alternative energy? Who knows? It could go either way from here.
Here is what I do know. Republlicans refuse to budge from “drill baby drill.” They are striving mightily to hang rising gas prices around President Biden’s neck, even though there’s not a whole lot he can do about them (and what little he can do, he’s trying to do). At the same time, they are ignoring wholesale the need to invest in other energy technology. Instead, they are taking advantage of the moment to gaslight the nation about oil.
For example, according to Paul Waldman, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently said “President Biden’s Green New Deal destroyed our energy surplus and it turned it into an energy crisis.” I haven’t found this quote elsewhere; she may have said this at the recent CPAC convention. But it’s an astonishing thing to claim for a bill that was never even voted on, much less became law, and which I don’t believe President Biden supported. Just saying the words “green new deal” causes oil deposits to dry up, apparently.
Of course, nobody can beat the former guy when it comes to stupid.
OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022
At Mother Jones, Chris D’Angelo lists The GOP’s Four Biggest Lies About Joe Biden and Fossil Fuels. They are:
1. The administration “destroyed” our energy industry
2. Biden “ended” oil and gas drilling on federal lands
3. Biden “shut off” the Keystone XL pipeline
4. Biden “destroyed American energy independence”
And, they are indeed all lies, as D’Angelo explains. But here’s the money quote:
The GOP campaign to blame Biden for both Russia’s war and high gas prices has included misleading statements and outright falsehoods, as well as circulating lists of demands that closely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry. It is being led by some of Washington’s largest beneficiaries of industry campaign donations. And it comes on the heels of the latest dire climate report from the United Nations, which warns that the window for reining in greenhouse gases in order to “secure a livable and sustainable future” is rapidly closing.
Recently White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shot down questions about Biden’s alleged refusal to allow oil companies to drill by noting that the oil companies are sitting on 9,000 approved drilling permits that are not being used. D’Angelo continues,
The goal, of course, is to leverage the crisis in Eastern Europe to provide more access and regulatory relief to an oil and gas sector that is already very profitable, heavily subsidized, has enormous sway in Washington, and is sitting on unused permits to drill across millions of acres of land and water. …
… In reality, the US produced more oil and gas during Biden’s first year in office than during Trump’s, and crude oil output is forecast to reach a record high in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
And the other goal is to undermine the Biden Administration, because they’d rather see the U.S. fail during a time of crisis than pass up an opportunity to bash Democrats.
Now, Mike Pence’s PAC is running a television ad with this voiceover:
“Before Russian bombs began to rain on Ukraine. Before hundreds of innocent Ukrainians lost their lives. A horrific decision had already been made. Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence on Russian oil, endangering America’s security
Do read all of Glenn Kessler’s fact check of the ad, and other Republican talking points. Here is more about the ad:
Text appears at one point: “U.S. reliance on Russian oil hits record high.” And then another text appears: “U.S. ‘paying Putin to invade’ Ukraine.” That is attributed, oddly, to “Oil analyst, Fox News.” (It turns out to be Stephen Schork, a onetime commodity trader and research analyst who writes a newsletter.)
We’re hearing incessantly about Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, and that’s why oil is so expensive. Kessler:
We’ve written many fact checks on this project over the years, about inflated claims about the number of jobs that would be created and about false assertions that the oil moving through it would bypass the United States. If the pipeline were built, the crude oil would travel to the Gulf Coast, where it would be refined into products such as motor gasoline and diesel fuel, with one estimate that 70 percent of the refined product would be consumed in the United States.
But here’s the rub — despite President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic backing, the pipeline still had not been built, because of court fights and other challenges. So even if Biden had not canceled it, there is little chance it would have been built by now. Biden’s move was more symbolic than anything else. (Moreover, in the past 10 years, the production of oil from tar sands has doubled, by more than what the Keystone XL would have carried, and it is ferried by other pipelines and by railroad.)
The most common complaint you get is that President Biden somehow kneecapped our energy industry by canceling new federal oil and gas leases. However, Kessler writes,
Biden did announce a halt to any new federal oil and gas leases shortly after taking office. But The Washington Post reported that in his first year, Biden outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands — in part because a federal judge last June struck down Biden’s executive order. So the administration resumed leasing, to the dismay of environmentalists.
Paul Waldman thinks the Ukraine war could take us backward on global warming. He writes,
In recent years as the climate crisis has intensified, opinion in the Republican Party on the subject has been divided into three camps. In one are those who sincerely want to do something about climate change, even if their proposals are relatively modest. At the other extreme are active climate deniers, who are a significant, if dwindling, portion of the party.
The largest group of Republicans is those who will reluctantly acknowledge that climate change is real, but don’t think we should do anything about it. While they don’t frame it this way, their actual position winds up being that we should make climate change worse by burning as much fossil fuels as possible while not moving in any active way to shift toward renewable energy.
This is maddening. For all their incessant whining about energy dependence, Republicans (and a couple of Democrats) never fail to put the brakes on doing the one thing that will free us from having to deal with the likes of Putin or Mohammed bin Salman — investing in alternative energy technology.
Waldman tells us that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed a bill intended to discourage people from installing solar panels on their homes in the Sunshine State. As I understand it, the new law puts big restrictions on net metering, which is the ability for a homeowner to send unused energy back to the power company for credit. Without net metering, it’s expected fewer people will bother installing solar panels. Waldman continues,
The net metering bill was basically written by Florida Power and Light. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald showed that its lobbyist delivered the text to the state senator who would introduce it in the legislature; two days later FPL’s parent company also delivered a $10,000 contribution to her PAC.
See also Jeff Goodell, Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees at Rolling Stone.
As Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovka put it in remarks during an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forum held (coincidentally) as Russian soldiers marched over the border: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels.”
The urgency of the climate crisis was underscored by the latest IPCC report, which, with doomsday levels of irony, was released the same week that Putin invaded. “The rise in weather and climate extremes,” the report notes, has already led to “irreversible impacts.” Heat waves have become more extreme, droughts deeper, wildfires more frequent, sea levels are rising faster. These changes are “contributing to humanitarian crises” that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. So far, the feeble attempts to adapt have been pathetically inadequate and “focused more on planning rather than implementation.”
What else is new?
Predictably, Republicans and their corrupt band of climate crooks and deniers immediately used the invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, not free ourselves from it. They willfully ignored the simple truth that there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world than with oil, gas, and coal. To them fossil fuels are the energy equivalent of testosterone. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that Biden’s “war on American oil and gas” made Putin stronger. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Fox News that “from the very day [Biden] got into the White House, he gave Putin all the power.”
Goodell writes that the battle of economic power is shifting away from the fossil fuel and toward renewable energy. That may be more apparent in Europe than the U.S., because I’m not seeing that here.
The Democrats need to go on offense against this garbage, and they need to do it yesterday.
JAAAAAAAAAAAAAYZOS H. KEEEEERIST jimmying open the lock on the sacramental wine to go on a bender!!!
RepubliKKKLANS don't ever seem to care about the ramifications of their actions or verbiage when they criticise Democrats.
One of the main reasons Putin invaded Ukraine is that he thought tRUMP had softened up the relationship between NATO and America. He guessed wrong, because one of the first things President Biden did was mend any wounds and smooth any feathers tRUMP's idiocy caused.
The reason Ukraine is doing as well as it is, is because, though they're not a part of NATO, for all intents and purposes, they are getting a lot of the benefits – outside of direct military involvement.
As for energy, the RepubliKKKLAN Party obviously still derives a huge chunk of campaign funds from the fossil fuel lobbyists.
Also, these clowns know that we can't just turn-on oil production like we do the bathroom light. It will take years to build the infrastructure to ramp up still more US oil! And we are, after all, trying to shift to renewables. Well, everyone but conservatives in that "we."
And I'd like to remind everyone of the huge spikes in gasoline and home heating oil after Dumbaya & Dick decided to go after Iraq's oil. The name of the military assault on Iraq said it all: "Operation Iraqi Liberation" = OIL. OIL was quickly changed to OIF, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" because OIL was too obvious. One of the few things RepubliKKKLANS are good at, is obfuscation! Oy!
Dumbaya & Dick brought that fossil fuel inflation on us by themselves! This spike has nothing to do with us.
Ok, back to today: RepubliKKKLANs can't let an opportunity go by to criticise a Democrat, especially one who is the POTUS.
Even if that hurts our country.
What have I been saying for years?
GOP POV:
Party over people!
PARTY OVER COUNTRY!!
PARTY UBER ALLES!!!!!
I am sure most Americans know much more misinformation about oil and the oil industry than accurate information. It has really been that way for at least 50 or 60 years. Of late it has become worse, because the oil industry itself is spreading deliberate misinformation and has politicians in their pockets to help do it for them. Trump has been feeding same old wind misinformation package, that has been poked so full of holes for so long, that it is more a worn-out bad joke than anything else.
The average consumer can be quite confident that energy companies are out to get them. As Texas found out last year, there is a real problem when the state's energy monopoly is in bed with the state government which is under complete Republican control. It is the classic case of putting the fox in charge of the hen house. It is not paranoia it is a failure to understand Republican politics and the power of an unbridled virtual monopoly. I bet there are young people out there who do not know the story of Enron, once a responsible small energy company that grew large and broke bad. Now bankrupt, they laughed in the corporate trading room as they plotted to rob California senior citizens though their energy bills. You get extra credit if you can name the state that once housed their corporate headquarters.
Isn't everyone onto Republican Standard Operating Procedure by now. Create a problem you can profit from and blame it on someone else. It is one of their favorites. The other one is to treat an imaginary or tiny problem as a huge one (like voter fraud) and then establish real 'legal' voter in their favor. Who needs enemies when you have a 'loyal' opposition party like that?
Second last sentence should read …real 'legal' voter fraud in their favor. The even had an Enron stadium in Texas once upon an earlier corrupt time.
Truth is the first casualty of war.
The fossil fuel industry has been making war on us for 50+ years.
The pharmaceutical industry has been making war on us since Saint Ronald of Rayguns led the charge to allow pharmaceutical advertising.
Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have been making war against the working classes since 1913.
The white supremacists have been making war against everyone who is not a white nationalist since the 'War of Northern Aggression'.
Christofascists have been making war against the rest of us since Nixon's Southern Strategy.
What’s the point of a good war in Ukraine if it can’t be used to advance wars within the USA?
OldVet,
Well, well said!
Using race, misogyny, market forces, and/or fundamentalist religion(s) to "Divide" people so you can "Conquer" them and save the "'Upperest' Class" are things that have been used for a long, long time to successfully save that "Upperest Class."
Never mention people's class.
You may start a race war (if you grok my little joke).
On gas prices, consider this metaphor. Once upon a time, there was lots of gold in California. Not as much as the legends that fueled the gold rush, but there was (for a short time) large-scale and profitable gold mining. Why not now? Has every stone in CA been turned over?
There is still gold in CA but the easy-to-get and highest concentrations have been mined. The gold that's left is prohibitively expensive to get.
Same deal with oil. I read that at one time, oil in Texas existed on the surface of the ground. Oil drilling initially searched for deposits only a short distance down – thse wells are long dry. Deepwater Horizon was drilling in the gulf, in water a mile deep to a deposit thought to extend to 18,000 feet. Why? The cheap, easy wells can't produce the volume of cheap oil. Saudi Arabia and UAE plus the Opec countries have large cheap deposits. So does Russia. They limit what they produce to keep prices high – when the price-fixing breaks down, prices fall. (SA and Russia got in a pissing contest – both overproducing to the benefit of consumers who saw gas at the pump under $2 per gallon in 2019-20.) It was forcing US companies to cap wells because pumping the oil was more costly than they could sell US oil for. What did Trump do? He called SA and Russia to cut production to get the price up in otder to protect US corporations.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/trump-calls-on-russia-and-saudi-arabia-to-cut-oil-production-161368
But the myth that oil prices are up because of Biden policies is irrefutable fact in the minds of Republican voters. And let's look at Putin and MBS (See Maha's last post.) Trump could not stick his nose far enough up Putin's butt. Low gas prices were a cornerstone of the Kremlin plan to get Trump re-elected. Trump was screwing up NATO at every opportunity – Putin's dream. Trump was protecting and insulating MBS for the brutal murder and dismemberment of a WaPo reporter, Jamal Kashoggi. UN Intel pinned the plan on MBS, but Trump personally fought any sanctions against him. So two guys with the power to close the valve on cheap oil also want to see Biden fail – Putin because of NATO and Ukraine – MBS because of pressure from the US over the murder. And yeah, it's a big coincidence that oil prices spiked under Biden.
You don't have to be Columbo to connect the dots here.
It is now my personal life-goal to make sure the saudi princes have their wealth redistributed to south Chicago… or wherever their wealth can mitigate suffering.
Oh, and by the way, when I say "suffering", I do not mean a temper-tantrum over mask wearing or life-saving medications.
Up until recently oil produced in the United States could not be exported to foreign countries. This law was repealed to favor large United States oil companies. (It is a background fact needed to understand the following)
This is from a recent Janet Yellen – Johnathan Capehart interview: (italics added)
Yes, the United States exports some of its oil to world market countries and up until recently bought oil from Russia. Odd one might think but true. Republicans fail to mention this fact.
Our European allies are the ones that will feel the major impact of cutting ties to Russian fossil fuels. They are still dependent on fossil fuels but are far ahead on energy conservation and renewable energy production. We need to quit wasting fossil fuels so we can help fill the gap for them. Russia and its conflict are the major factor in world oil price uptick. Again, from the same interview with italics added.
Transcript: The Path Forward: U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen (msn.com)
Cyberspace stole my added italics!