The Biden administration has, at long last, finally decided to follow the law — only just a bit. And it really doesn’t want people to know about it either way, which is why the announcement was made on Good Friday afternoon.
After refusing to comply with a court order requiring him to sell leases for oil and gas exploration on federal land last year, Biden is finally succumbing to the pressure of high gas prices. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he is selling a mere fraction of the leases the government would normally sell. This probably belongs in the category of “better than nothing.”
The decision also comes with some entertainment value. Just a week after Democrats sat in a committee hearing excoriating oil executives for failing to produce enough, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released an extremely arrogant statement that turned that entire line of argument into the joke it always was.
“For too long, the federal oil and gas leasing programs have prioritized the wants of extractive industries above local communities, the natural environment, the impact on our air and water, the needs of tribal nations, and, moreover, other uses of our shared public lands,” her statement reads.
This is just so much claptrap to placate environmentalists, who will be extremely angry about this anyway.
Their real objection they will hold in reserve — that we should never use oil or natural gas. But since reasonable people don’t accept that, they will make the argument that this oil and gas won’t be available in time to help with the current crisis. This is, of course, a long-running fallacy they resort to. This oil and gas would already be worth a lot more if we had started looking for it last year, but Biden paused all new exploration on federal lands. The oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be flowing in abundance today but for their three-decade campaign of resistance. You have to start sometime.
Today, new sources and supplies of oil and gas are a prerequisite for getting Europe to commit to boycotting Russian supplies. Until Europe joins our boycott, it is not going to work. For now, all our boycott is doing is increasing the price at which Putin can sell his oil and gas to his regular customers. It may be the right thing, but it won’t work unless our allies get involved as well, and that means providing them with alternatives.
The best way to counter those “Putin price hikes” at the gas pump has always been to produce the gas here at home. But the long-term beneficiaries of what we do now will be our trading partners. Many European countries listened to environmentalists for too long and made themselves too dependent upon Russian oil and gas. They are now realizing that this isn’t going to work. They need to produce more of their own energy or find other non-Russia sources, lest they find themselves at the mercy of their neighborhood narcissistic bully in Moscow.
Just as Sweden and Finland are now moving to join NATO because they realize they could be on Russia’s menu in 2030 or 2035, we need to be thinking ahead — at least to next winter and surely beyond that, when Russian threats to cut off the supply of natural gas could force further diplomatic concessions. Our fracking and a dramatic increase in the export of liquefied natural gas can be part of the solution, in tandem with a new European commitment to fracking and nuclear power.
Russia’s most powerful weapon is not nuclear bombs, a weapon of last resort, but natural gas. We can fix that by exporting much more liquefied natural gas to European ports, weakening Russia and helping our allies at the same time.
Meanwhile, Biden’s decision gives the lie to his own excuses and laughable defense of his own conduct up to now. What happened to that talking point about all those leases and permits that were already issued? I thought all these oil companies were somehow getting rich by not producing oil — at least, that’s what a dozen Democratic House members claimed in their hearing last week. What happened to that argument?
The high gas prices and the war in Ukraine are putting Democrats into that proverbial circular room where they cannot find a corner to sit. Democrats support high gas prices — it’s part of their environmental agenda. But voters hate high gas prices, so Democrats need a scapegoat. They tried Putin, but the timeline didn’t work, so then they tried to blame oil companies. Now Biden has at least halfheartedly answered the oil companies’ demands for more leases, which has made all those Democrats look like idiots.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.
