A new Wall Street Journal report confirms what many observers have suspected and what appears to be part of a larger Biden administration agenda to push “fossil fuel” prices ever-higher for Americans.
Timothy Puko and Anthony DeBarros write:
“The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.”
And by “early stages,” the authors mean, essentially, the first year-and-a-half:
“President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.”
Which brings back bitter memories of Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki poo-pooing the protestations of oil company reps, gas station owners, desperate manufacturers, and US consumers that the Bidenistas were smothering the ability of U.S.-based energy companies to tap into new, productive stores of energy.
And that doesn’t even include the lock the feds have placed on oil refinery construction, a politically-imposed problem that, as MRCTV Director Eric Scheiner noted in June, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth believes the D.C. politicians will not correct to allow for freedom.
Most of us, surely, have figured out the driver of the high gas, oil, Diesel, coal, and natural gas price and supply problems. It’s government – via central-bank-caused inflation of the money supply, and federal clampdowns on exploration, importation, refining, and energy supply.
Since day ONE of the Biden administration, when Joe nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, to his stoppage of new offshore oil and gas exploration leases, to his most recent move to unconstitutionally ban Russian energy imports (which has not harmed Russia in the least, since Chinese state-tied energy companies are buying the Russian LNG, then reselling it to those “pro-Ukraine” European nation-states, giving both the Russians and Chinese hefty profits) the Biden administration has engaged in a systematic carry-through of Biden’s campaign promise to try to destroy the U.S. oil and gas industries – and all at the expense of not only the energy industries, but at the expense of our ability to better or sustain our standards of living.
Americans for Prosperity started an ongoing list of these poisonous Biden administration policies in December of 2021, and kept updating through June of this year with 25 ways Joe and his chums have used government aggression to stifle energy supply and raise prices.
How odd: a government-created monopoly bank and federal claims of control over the energy industry appear to have made energy more expensive, while, at the same time, the centrally-connected, government-run school systems around the U.S. have brought Americans a dramatic DROP in fourth-grade children’s math and reading scores.
It’s almost as if there’s a common element there…
And, even as the D.C. hacks have engaged in this mafia-like intercession between us and those with whom we could – and possibly would like to – exchange for energy, even as inflation has teamed up with their dumb claims of Delphic “we-know-the-energy-of-the-future” genius, the Bidenistas also have engaged in one of the most extended gaslighting campaigns since they blamed the so-called “pandemic” on the “unvaccinated.”
Their gaslighting agents included former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who, in March, absurdly claimed that the administration was NOT hobbling energy exploration, implying that it was the oil and gas companies’ greed that saw them not moving to explore – a claim that was ripped to shreds by people who actually make their livings in the field.
As Tyler Olsen reported March 8 for FoxNews, American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) CEO Anne Bradbury retorted to Psaki’s insinuation by explaining:
"The fact is that (the energy) industry is producing at a higher level on existing leases on federal lands than in the last 20 years and these leases take many years to explore, to develop and produce on.”
Olsen also spoke to Mike Sommers, the head of the American Petroleum Institute:
"’This (Psaki’s claim about unused leases) represents a fundamental misunderstanding as to how this process works,’ American Petroleum Institute (API) president and CEO Mike Sommers told FOX Business when asked about Psaki's comments. ‘Once you lease land there is a whole process that you have to go through. First you have to actually discover whether actually there is oil and gas in that land. Second of all, you have to get a permit to actually develop that land.’"
And, of course, the Bidenistas have fought since the start of his administration to not issue any more leases.
Adds Olsen:
“’Energy Workforce and Technology Council CEO Leslie Beyer similarly said ‘some permits are viable and some are not,’ as a reason for why many are sitting unused. The federal leasing moratorium also isn't helpful in the current energy environment, she said. ‘The moratorium on leasing certainly adds an additional… block to American energy production, so that is the opposite of what we need to be doing right now,’ she said. ‘We need to stop the rhetoric that's anti-fossil fuel and we need some clarity just in the regulatory sense that this administration is behind domestic energy production.’"
Now, with the new data from the Wall Street Journal, Americans get to collect more data and more perspective about who is trying to cater to their interests and offer competitive market prices, and who is intent on controlling them to remake the world into a centrally-planned, government-run power-grid dystopia.
For added perspective, consider this. It wasn’t until the “Mineral Leasing Act of 1920” that the feds began to shake-down oil companies, making them buy leases to explore and, later, permits, to drill. But that process, itself, was clouded by already-established oil big-wigs who utilized their political connections to exclude small, start-up, competition.
The key here is that the feds aren’t supposed to control these lands in the first place.
As I have noted for MRCTV, the Constitution not only does not allow the feds to “lease” anything on federally-run lands, it only allows the feds to own three types of land: the 10-square-mile area reserved for the Capital, land for military garrisons, and territories.
When territories become states, they are supposed to enter with all the constitutional privileges of states, which means they don’t have to cede land to the feds.
So, as the big lesson here, we can remember that government parks. so-called “national heritage sites,” “nature reserves,” and control over the coasts are inarguably unconstitutional.
But, like the Bidenistas won’t discuss the truth about their unhinged zeal to push America into a solar/wind government-controlled power-prison, they – and most Republicans -- won’t face the falsehood of their underlying assumptions about what lands the feds can run.
Yet most of us are not the folks who swear oaths to the Constitution. They, in government, are.
But we are the ones who have to remind them of what it says.
Which is an indication that this U.S. system is rotten from the inside, and running out of fuel.
Related: Chevron CEO: ‘There Will Never Be Another Refinery Built In The U.S.’ | MRCTV