by Rex Murphy
Joe Biden the Wise, as history must record him, has recently brought his fabled wit’s lacerating whip to “big oil.”
Thank you, Joseph.
Naturally, the sage of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is enraged beyond simple anger that the price of oil and gas has risen staggeringly, that half of Europe is in a dictator’s energy hammerlock, and that his so-called Middle East allies are rebuking his teary-eyed pleas to increase oil production. [bold, links added]
He is, as the paradoxical idiom has it, “beside himself.”
How little all of this squares with the Aristotle of our time’s first executive decision, his signature move as president, made on his first day in office, to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline.
That was the sign and emblem that he was green, and that green was the direction of his incumbency.
Recall in consideration. He was fighting Donald Trump, so not only was not all permitted, all was necessary. “Sauron” Trump was for drilling. So it had to be stopped.
Consider Biden’s nine-point Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution released during his campaign, wherein he promised that:Day 1 of the Biden Administration is going to be very busy! To immediately make progress on his climate agenda, (I) will take actions including requiring aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations; developing rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100 percent of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emissions and annual improvements for heavy-duty vehicles; protecting America’s natural treasures by permanently protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas impacted by President Trump’s attack on federal lands and waters; and banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters. (Italics, mine.)
It is only naysayers and partisan nitpickers who, to use an Al Gore word, bring up this “inconvenient” Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and I am certainly not one of them.
Two years later it should result in the emaciation of the United State’s energy independence and have vastly empowered imperious Vladimir Putin, putting Europe hostage to an autocrat, well, let’s go with the flow — them’s just the breaks.
So here we are. When wise, calm Biden pleads to OPEC and gets shunned, briskly turned down during an inflation-and-energy crisis, and presents to the globe the picture of an American president pleading to autocrats for relief and being rejected, it should charitably be seen not as his lack of foresight, but the cruelty of fate, and perhaps only secondarily the operation of the laws of supply and demand.
Or just maybe the outcome of policies built on air and virtue-signaling, without thought of the realities of societies built on real and secure energy, of which there are some examples here at home.
So the decision to reduce the production of the oil and gas America has, and cancel a source from a secure and neighboring state — that would (sorry, used to) be Canada — is it possible the gods of common sense have taken an unhappy view of it?
Give a dictator reign over the only proven and present source of supply, while subsidizing its fantastical replacements in search of net zero? I offer an axiom: windmills are a dictator’s best friend.
How could any of these policies possibly go wrong?
However, now that the dynamic has changed, the Biden administration — like another government I will shortly come to — has taken a different stance.
Having amputated America’s energy leadership, he is now hurling thunderbolts at the industry he just two years ago deplored, denigrated, and denounced.
Now the same is “profiteers.” Says the sage now, the oil industry “has not met its commitment to invest in America and support the American people.”
They’re not just making a “fair return,” he says, they’re making “profits so high it’s hard to believe.”
Does this square, at all, with the “nine points” plan?
Dear Adam Smith, how did this happen? For is it now an iron law of economics and reality that when stuff is plentiful it costs less, and when it is scarce it costs more.