My Dad owned three gas stations when I was a kid. My first job was working in his gas stations during my teens through both OPEC oil embargos in 1973 and 1979. Those were OPEC induced oil shortages, for political reasons.
Let’s be clear: we do not currently have a shortage of crude oil in the world oil market.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration sees OPEC spare capacity at 5.11 million bpd in the fourth quarter of 2022. Moreover, “During the 2014-2016 downturn in global oil prices, the number of wells left incomplete grew as companies shut down rigs, laid off workers and retreated from the fields. When prices picked up, operators were expected to pump the oil from those incomplete wells before spending money on drilling new ones.” All Drill, No Pump: Oil Producers Are Leaving Thousands of U.S. Wells Unfinished. That hasn’t happened because investors demanded a return on their money that they lost during the oil price downturn, and Big Oil always listens to its investors.
What we do have is a shortage of refining capacity in the United States, again because of investment decisions made my Big Oil and its shareholders. All the crude oil in the world isn’t worth much if you cannot refine it into gasoline and deliver it to the pump.
Reuters reported, Oil refining capacity fell for first time in 30 years in 2021, IEA says:
Global oil refining capacity fell for the first time in 30 years last year, as new capacity was outweighed by closures, the International Energy Agency said in its monthly oil market report on Wednesday.
Refining capacity was down by 730,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2021, the IEA said, but net additions were expected to amount to 1.2 million bpd in 2022.
Global runs are forecast to rise by 3.7 million bpd in 2022, the IEA added. Refinery throughput averaged 79.8 million bpd in the fourth quarter of 2021, it added.
[During the global pandemic], about 900,000 bpd of refining capacity in Asia (excluding China) has been either shut or scheduled to permanently close before the end of 2022, the IEA said.
An industry reporter, Argus media reports, US refining expects resurgent 2022:
US refiners are set for a shift back toward pre-pandemic profits in 2022, with many expecting Covid-19 restrictions to taper amid rebounding demand for products this year.
An emerging consensus points to a smoother road ahead for US refiners in 2022 as governments take a more cautious approach to pandemic travel, work and gathering curtailments. While the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus waylaid some of the keener expectations for US refining’s recovery in 2021, some are confident that the worst of the pandemic’s demand slump has come and gone.
“If you looked at each successive wave, Covid has had less impact on demand,” Phillips 66 chief executive Greg Garland said during the Goldman Sachs Energy and Clean Technology Conference earlier this month. “We’re moving more to an endemic phase versus a pandemic phase.”
Facilities able to weather the storm of the past few years are set to cash in. US bank Wells Fargo earlier this week raised earnings-per-share estimates for US refiners for a second consecutive quarter, on expectations that refinery closures across the last few years will leave survivors with less competition. The bank expects combined refinery utilization levels in the US to match levels last seen in 2018, when refineries averaged 93.1pc utilization, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Resistant demand, tight stocks and a smaller field of refiners should lead to decade-high refining margins in 2022 before the market becomes oversupplied late in the year, according to Argus Consulting’s January Crude and Refined Products Outlook. Argus Consulting forecasts US Gulf coast fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) refining margins vs Louisiana Light Sweet (LLS) to average $7/bl in the first quarter of 2022, $7.60/bl in the second quarter and $9.20/bl in the third — all of which would represent the highest marks recorded by Argus dating back to 2010.
It is OPEC, Big Oil and its investors who are responsible for the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline at the pump. Period. Full stop.
It’s funny you don’t hear any of the Republicans talking about the fact that the oil companies made record-breaking profits this past year. pic.twitter.com/iapKTQGhm0
— ❤️🧡💛ᗰia💚💙💜 (@mommamia1217) March 15, 2022
Republicans and their fascist propaganda media are cynically attacking President Biden for high gas prices because it is politiclly expedient for them to do so, and they would never attack some of their biggest campaign contributors in Big Oil.
So we get stupid Republican trolls doing stupid shit like this. The People Behind the Joe Biden Sticker That Has Colonized America’s Gas Pumps (excerpt):
The stickers first started showing up on gas pumps across the country last year: pictures of President Biden, usually placed to look like he is pointing to the price of the gas, with the words “I did that!” beside him. After first spiking in popularity online months ago, the stickers are hot once again these days, thanks to recent sharp rises in gas prices—$4.33 on average for a gallon of regular. With some consumers mad enough to become sticker vigilantes and Biden’s approval ratings in the dumps, there’s only one real winner in this situation: the sticker profiteers themselves.
[As] the stickers have become popular, gas station employees have complained about the difficulty of getting them off the gas pumps or the worry that they might rankle some patrons.
Lack of respect for other people’s property, and vandalizing their property – sooo Republican these days.
Slate reports, Joe Biden Didn’t Do This:
As gas prices have surged over the past several months—and shot up even further following Russia’s incursion into Ukraine—Republicans have predictably tried to pin blame on the White House.
“Joe Biden caused this and doesn’t seem to care,” the Republican National Committee’s deputy communications director tweeted last week, echoing the stickers that Trump-voting motorists have been slapping onto gas pumps across the country.
But President Joe Biden did not cause this. In fact, other than sanctions against Russia—which the GOP broadly supported—the primary reasons why filling up your tank has gotten more expensive over the past year have almost nothing to do with America’s chief executive. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since presidents almost never have much direct control over gas prices. But unfortunately voters act like they do, which is sort of the sad cosmic joke of American politics.
But I digress. Let’s debunk the argument, shall we?
Why Absolutely Nothing Republicans Are Saying About Gas Prices Makes Sense
Members of the GOP have been saying that a big reason the cost of gas soared over the past few months is that the president simply hasn’t let oil companies drill enough.
Specifically, they say, the White House has bottled up American fossil fuel production by issuing fewer oil leases on federal lands and by stopping pipeline construction.
For example: Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee complained in a letter this month “there has not been one lease sale on federal lands since you imposed a ban in violation of federal law.” (They implored Biden to “take the shackles off American energy.”) And the House Republicans’ campaign chief blamed the gas price spike on the administration shutting down “drilling on federal lands,” “freezing all the permits” offered to oil drillers, and “killing the Keystone XL pipeline.”
It is true that U.S. oil production is lower now than it was in in February of 2020, when it hit an all-time record high of 12.8 million barrels. (That was before the market crashed at the onset of the coronavirus crisis.) But based on the GOP’s rhetoric, you might be tempted to think that U.S. oil production had collapsed since Biden stepped into the Oval Office.
That’s just not the case: In fact, oil production has actually increased, from about 11 million barrels per day to 11.5 million barrels through 2021. As Biden himself noted last week when announcing sanctions on Russian energy, domestic oil companies pumped more crude during the first year of his presidency than in the first year of Donald Trump’s. The number of oil rigs operating in the United States is still growing, too.
Indeed, much to the frustration of climate activists, Biden has actually done very little to slow fossil fuel production on federal property.
Biden did promise to halt new drilling on federal lands during his campaign. And in the first months of his term, he temporarily paused the sale of new public oil leases. But a federal judge struck down this pause in June, and then, in November, the Biden administration held the single largest-ever auction of oil and gas drilling leases from the Gulf of Mexico, locking in a future guarantee of more than 1 billion new barrels of oil from that region. (It’s worth noting that the administration was not required to make this sale, as the Justice Department itself admitted—it was entirely the government’s choice.)
The Biden administration also did pause sales again last month, after a Trump-appointed judge blocked the administration from considering climate costs when auctioning oil leases. So it’s a GOP-approved official who’s forced this halt on land sales while the administration rejiggers its energy accounting.
More to the point: Even if Biden had approved the Gulf of Mexico tracts earlier in his term, or leased more federal lands before the current pause, it wouldn’t have made much difference in today’s oil prices. It would have taken many months—in some cases, years—to extract, refine, and put those billion barrels on the market.
It’s also false to say the Keystone XL pipeline’s shutdown plays a role here. Last June, when Biden canceled an important permit for the Alberta-to-Nebraska crude pipeline, only 8 percentof the entire line had been constructed; the completed pipe wouldn’t have gone online until next year at the earliest. The Keystone talking point likewise ignores that the Biden administration allowed the controversial Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota to finish construction and go online in the fall, allowing for ongoing transports of Alberta crude. So there’s little reason for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy or South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be so upset. We’re not suffering for crude imports from Canada, anyway, in large part because tens of millions of barrels travel into the U.S. by rail.
The Real Issue: Oil Companies Are Actually Just Trying to Pad Their Profits
The real reason U.S. oil production hasn’t returned to peak production levels has less to do with Biden’s energy policies than with the fossil fuel industry’s desire to earn a buck.
As demand for oil has resurged from its mid-2020 lows, producers have been under pressure from shareholders to “put profits over production increases” and “return cash to shareholders rather than pump it back into drilling,” to quote the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, respectively. As a result, companies have only expanded production slowly.
Just listen to oil executives themselves. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” the CEO of Pioneer, which is the largest oil producer in the Permian Basin, the key oil-producing area of the Southwest, said at a Bloomberg event last month. “If the president wants us to grow, I just don’t think the industry can grow anyway.”
Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub has likewise said her company is focused on paying back investors at the moment: “I feel now that we do need to return cash to the shareholders in the form of dividends or buybacks, especially during the better cycles.”
Profit motives have held back oil production outside the U.S. too. OPEC countries hard hit from the recession kept a tight cap on output last fall—despite pressure from the U.S. and Japan and India to pump more—in order to goose their revenues. They only began to relent last week, when the United Arab Emirates announced it would increase production, leading prices to retreat a bit. As oil historian Gregory Brew told me last month, the UAE does have spare oil capacity at hand—and it doesn’t want continued high prices to potentially suppress global demand.
Energy companies and oil-rich Middle Eastern monarchies aren’t the only ones cashing in. An L.A. Times report notes that some of the California gas stations that were charging $7 per gallon were setting their prices far above state and national averages because they found that desperate drivers were willing to pay—even if it hurts.
This is known as price gouging, and it is a crime in many states. Unfortunately, Arizona is not one of them. See, One Man’s Pandemic Is Another Man’s Profit: Price Gouging in Arizona During Times of Crisis.
Senator Whitehouse is a brilliant badass!
He’s got some ideas of what to do with the profits the oil execs have been raking in.
Watch 👀pic.twitter.com/K7lysJHgjc
— ❤️🧡💛ᗰia💚💙💜 (@mommamia1217) March 15, 2022
Why All This Actually Sort of Matters
Aside from political points scoring, why does any of this matter? Well, it has implications for a policy debate that’s unfolding in Washington.
At the moment, the Biden administration is looking to secure new sources of oil to offset the loss of Russian crude, and has been talking to Iran and Venezuela about increasing production in return for reducing sanctions on those countries. But this move has triggered a bipartisan backlash from foreign policy hawks, who don’t want the U.S. doing business with either of those nations. Republicans have introduced a bill to ban the U.S. from purchasing oil from those countries, and have argued that Biden should be focused on increasing U.S. production instead.
This position only makes sense if you think the Biden administration is holding the U.S. oil industry back. But the TL;DR here is that it is not Biden—it’s the drillers themselves who are holding it back.
Oil prices have come down quite a bit in recent days thanks to various global developments, but they are still hovering above $100 a barrel. Unless our government is willing to do business with some unsavory regimes, American drivers are probably going to keep feeling pain at the pump.
But as long as they’re blaming Biden, Republicans will probably be just fine with that.
Because being militantly ignorant and a troll is what Republicans are all about these days.
Republicans no longer do policy. They literally have no answers nor any credible solutions to offer. Putting them in charge is like putting your idiot cousin in charge of your life. Would you ever do that? Of course not. Then wake the fuck up and tell these stupid Republican trolls to fuck off!
UPDATE:
Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too.
Last time oil was $96 a barrel, gas was $3.62 a gallon. Now it’s $4.31.
Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans. pic.twitter.com/uLNGleWBly
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 16, 2022
Yeah, gas is topping $4.60 a gallon. But @DougDucey has no interest in suspending state's 18-cent-a-gallon levy to provide some relief, instead using the situation to lash out at the Biden administration. https://t.co/pPRQv9d7g8
— Capitol Media Services 📢 Telling it like it is (@azcapmedia) March 15, 2022
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The Washington Post’s Fact Cjecker Glemm Kessler explains, “The truth about gas prices and oil production”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/15/truth-about-gas-prices-oil-production/
(excerpt)
A separate debate is taking place over U.S. oil production and whether Biden administration policies have played a role. Partisans on all sides, as is often the case, are misrepresenting the facts, obscuring the complicated truth about oil production, gas prices and the role of renewables. Here’s a guide to that issue.
Gasoline prices have soared overnight. How is that possible?
The war — and efforts by the United States and its allies to stem purchases of Russian energy products — sent the price of crude oil skyrocketing. Many gasoline stations have only two or three days of product in stock, and so price gasoline at what it will cost to refill those tanks underground. This is an economic term known as “replacement cost.”
Every $10 increase in the price of crude oil adds about 24 cents to the cost of each gallon of gasoline and is quickly reflected in what you pay at the pump. It’s not an example of price gouging [it may be]. Still, the price of gasoline is nearing — or may exceed — previous inflation-adjusted highs reached in 1918, 1981 and 2008. [Did you catch that? Prices have been this high before when adjusted for inflation.]
Is the United States ramping up its oil production, or holding it back?
The oil business in the United States is run by private companies, not the U.S. government. It’s also a cyclical business and oil prices have been low for some time and drilling has also been low.
During the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, when oil prices fell sharply, to about $23 a barrel, production plummeted because it was no longer as profitable. Now, with crude oil above $100 a barrel, there is more of an incentive to ramp up U.S. production, though it is still below the high reached in 2020 before the pandemic struck.
In February 2020, U.S. oil production reached 13.1 million barrels a day. Two years later, in February of this year, production was about 11 percent lower — 11.6 million barrels a day.
Gasoline prices have steadily risen in the United States since April 2020 [Trump was still president], when the weekly price dropped to as low $1.77 a gallon. It had already risen to $2.38 a gallon when Biden took office.
There’s little evidence that Biden’s policies have had any direct impact on oil production. However, the U.S. government can have an effect of shaping market perceptions that on the margins can affect prices.
As soon as he took office, Biden terminated the Keystone XL pipeline and signaled a hostility to the fossil fuel industry with a major push for clean energy, including a pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.
Keystone XL still would not have been built by now even if Biden had permitted it to go forward — and even if it were in place, the impact in prices would be measured in pennies. Moreover, even without Keystone XL, imports from Canada have increased about 50 percent over the past decade. But Biden’s actions early in his tenure, some experts say, sent “yellow light” signals to the market that cost of drilling for oil might rise and so caution was warranted.
The reverse can also be true. The Trump’s administration’s opposite “green light” approach — few regulations and no restraints — led some oil drillers to invest in unprofitable wells.
Biden also issued an executive order that paused new oil and gas leases on government land, but within months a federal judge blocked it. After his first year, Biden had outpaced Donald Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands.
Just because a company has received a permit to drill, it has no obligation to do so. One important metric is what is known as a DUC — a drilled but uncompleted oil or gas well. In other words, production equipment has not been installed and so the well cannot yet produce hydrocarbons. The number of DUCs reached a high of 6,340 in June 2020, and as of February had dropped to 4,372, according to EIA.
Can the U.S. truly change oil prices by encouraging more drilling and allowing pipelines?
Not really. The United States in 2020 was the biggest oil producer in the world and also the biggest consumer — but it is just one player in a global oil market. (“Oil” includes crude oil, all other petroleum liquids, and biofuels.) Much of what happens in the market is beyond the government’s control.
In 2021, the United States slipped to third place in oil production, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. That’s mainly because large shale companies committed to Wall Street that they would continue to limit production and return more cash to shareholders — “an effort to win back investors who fled the industry after years of poor returns,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, told investors in February: “$100 oil, $150 oil, we’re not going to change our growth rate.”
U.S. oil producers boosted output by more than 50 percent between 2016 and 2020, so it’s certainly possible for the United States to once again become the world’s biggest oil producer. But investors are demanding that companies do not overspend on new investments this time around.
If the United States is a top oil producer, why do we still need to import oil?
The United States actually exports more oil than it imports. In 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration, the United States imported about 8.47 million barrels per day of petroleum, compared to exports of 8.63 million barrels per days. Crude accounts for about 35 percent of those exports. One key reason is that foreign countries use more diesel than the United States and the United States uses more gasoline.
The boom in U.S. shale oil has certainly reduced reliance on foreign oil imports, but not all crude oil is the same. Refiners on the Gulf Coast, for instance, have been optimized for Venezuelan crude, which has a high sulfur content. When the Trump administration put sanctions on Venezuelan petroleum, refiners started imported Russian petroleum products because they are roughly similar. Now that Russia has been sanctioned, refiners probably will have to adjust to a cleaner type of crude.
In other words, the United States cannot be an island in the worldwide energy market. But it is more secure as a net exporter of petroleum.
The lazy corporate media which practices “bothsiderism” simply parrots GQP propaganda and gives it equal weight to actual factual statements. Part of the problem as I have said before is that few reporters even took an Econ 101 in class in college. They know as little about economics as the average American – they quite literally have no idea what they are tlking about.
Jennifer Rubin explains, “TV coverage amplifies the GOP’s false claims about gas prices”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/13/gop-lies-gas-media/
Unsurprisingly, the most egregious examples of the media regurgitating right-wing talking points on gas prices often come from Fox News. White House reporter Peter Doocy has parroted oil industry talking points at White House briefings and insinuated that the administration is being dishonest about the cause of inflation. (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) It’s increasingly obvious to those outside the right-wing bubble that the “news” side of Fox often serves as a content provider for the MAGA propaganda machine.
But the rest of the White House press corps and cable TV news outlets also habitually repeat GOP talking points on energy, even as reliable print media debunks them. Headlines such as “GOP blames Biden for gas prices after pushing for Russian oil ban” on ABC News’s website serve to amplify false claims. Politico’s “Biden blames Putin for inflation. GOP blames Biden.” might be the perfect distillation of bothsidesism. And NBC’s “Republicans cheer Russian oil ban and jeer Biden for rising gas prices” epitomizes coverage that treats the topic as a contest of partisan claims.
We know Republicans’ claims are untrue. The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded four Pinocchios to an ad from former vice president Mike Pence that “tries to make two distinct statements — Biden canceled the Keystone pipeline and Russian imports of oil reached a high under Biden — but it does so in a way that virtually all viewers are going to think the two are connected.”
Likewise, the New York Times found that GOP claims blaming the Biden administration for rising energy prices were “misleading.” The report confirmed, “The primary reason for rising gas prices over the past year is the coronavirus pandemic and its disruptions to global supply and demand.” The pandemic brought the economy to a halt, reduced energy demand and slowed production; when demand popped back, supply was low and prices increased.
Moreover, the administration has not reduced domestic production since the Trump administration. “The country became a net exporter of petroleum in 2020, the first time since at least 1949. That remained the case in 2021. It became a net exporter of natural gas in 2018 and remains so today, with exports reaching record levels in 2021.”
As for the administration’s cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline, another go-to GOP attack, our imports from Canada increased 70 percent without it. And when it comes to federal oil lease permits, “the Biden administration actually approved 34 percent more of these permits than the Trump administration did in its first year.”
So if GOP talking points are factually incorrect, why does the White House press corps repeat them, giving them the air of legitimacy? It is part of a familiar pattern in which mainstream TV reporters and White House press equalize the two political parties. Republicans say X; the White House says Y. That is the prevalent notion of “balance” and being tough on an administration (even though the current one does not routinely lie, the way its predecessor did). When facts are verifiable, the media’s pretense of balance is misleading.
Even more egregiously, TV news media fails to confront Republicans about their provably false allegations. You simply do not hear TV interviewers ask Republicans: “Since the Keystone XL Pipeline would not have increased supply, why do you keep using its cancellation to attack the White House?” “Energy companies can pump all the oil they want from private lands and even begin drilling on lands with unused leases, so how is this the White House’s fault?” (Even more rarely do you get a succinct explanation that oil prices are set globally in the international marketplace.)
In framing oil prices as a political story of the “GOP claim vs. White House defense” variety, the media provides demonstrably false accusations with oxygen. The political story gets tilted in Republicans’ favor and, moreover, misinforms the public about the substantive issues surrounding “energy independence” and pricing. To boot, the media largely avoids confronting GOP politicians on their dependence on political contributions from the oil and gas industry.
This media failure is part of the larger problem in coverage of two parties that do not equally respect facts and truth. As unnatural as it may be for reporters trained not to “take sides,” their obligation to news consumers is to tell the truth, not to provide cover for disingenuous politicians. They should be on the side of the reality. It’s Republicans’ own fault if they get caught denying it.
Steve Benen writes, “Why the political debate over gas prices is such a mess”, https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/political-debate-gas-prices-mess-rcna19751
At face value, the cynicism surrounding Republicans’ rhetoric about gas prices is head-spinning. The party that demanded the Biden administration ban the import of Russian oil is the same party that’s blaming the Biden administration for consumers paying more at the pump — in response to the ban on important Russian oil.
But compounding the problem is the GOP’s policy incoherence and eagerness to peddle claims that are plainly untrue. The New York Times reported this week:
Keeping up with the avalanche of dubious claims has been challenging, and it’s likely much of the public no longer knows what to think. But let’s quickly review some of the more common questions raised by the right as part of the recent debate.
Didn’t gas prices drop toward the end of Donald Trump’s term? Yes, and the former president likes to take credit for that, but he shouldn’t. Gas prices fell in 2020 for the same reason they fell in 2008: There was a recession. As the Covid-19 crisis intensified, demand collapsed, supply grew, and so prices dropped. That’s the result of Capitalism 101, not Republican energy policies.
Why did gas prices start climbing “the day President Biden took office”? That’s what Republicans have claimed, but it’s plainly false. In fact, prices were already on the rise by Inauguration Day 2021.
Why did the Biden White House kill domestic energy production? To the disappointment of many on the left, we’ve known for months that the Democratic administration has done largely the opposite. As a Vox report explained last week, “Biden has done nothing to halt oil leasing. In fact, the Biden administration has outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands and water in its first year, according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity.”
Can’t Biden simply increase domestic production? There is no state-run oil company capable of conducting its own drilling operation. What the administration can do is issue drilling permits to private companies, which is what’s already happened. Those companies could boost production, but that largely has not happened — in large part because they’re gun shy about the economy, though greed appears to have something to do with it.
Isn’t the cancelation of the Keystone pipeline partly to blame for high prices? Not in this reality, it’s not. As the Times’ report added, “By the time Mr. Biden rescinded its permit on his first day in office, just 8 percent of [Keystone] had been built. Even if Mr. Biden had greenlighted the project and TransCanada, now known as TC Energy, had won its court battles, it is unlikely that the pipeline would have been operational today given that the company estimated in March 2020 that it would have entered into service in 2023.” (Republican Rep. August Pfluger insisted this week that the administration should turn the pipeline “back on,” which didn’t make any sense at all, since it was never “on” in the first place.)
Why isn’t the United States “energy independent,” the way it was under Trump? Putting aside the fact that “energy independent” is a politically meaningless phrase with little policy value, the truth remains that the United States is still a net exporter. That was true before Biden took office, and it’s still true while he remains in office.
The Times’ report added, “The country became a net exporter of petroleum in 2020, the first time since at least 1949. That remained the case in 2021. It became a net exporter of natural gas in 2018 and remains so today, with exports reaching record levels in 2021.”
Why is U.S. energy production going down under Biden? It’s not. U.S. energy production is going up under Biden (again, to the disappointment of many on the left).
Why do Democrats keep blaming Vladimir Putin for higher prices? Because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed prices higher. Perhaps the better question is why GOP leaders seem so eager to let Putin off the hook and instead blame their own country’s leaders.
Wouldn’t increased drilling in the U.S. make a meaningful differences on prices at the pump? That’s never worked before, and no one seriously believes it would work now.
Aren’t Biden’s regulations strangling the energy industry? John Kemp, senior market analyst at Thomson Reuters, said this week, “There’s no evidence that the regulatory environment is what has held the U.S. oil and gas sector back, and by extension, no indication that making the regulatory environment more permissive would generate additional production in the near term.”
As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown added this week, “In the race to politically exploit the high cost of gas, Republicans are banking on voters not caring that they’re lying through their teeth about how much of this is Biden’s fault.”
-This a a safe bet among Republicans who are used to being lied to, and actually enjoy being lied to with entertaining memes with which to “own the libs” as part of their sick GQP tribalism culture of cruelty and hatred.