by E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder Steve Milloy
As appearing on cnsnews.com
President Biden has repeatedly promised to “work like the devil” and “to do everything in my power” to lower gasoline prices. Is he?
Biden has promised to release one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for up to six months. Although that sounds like a lot, it’s not.
U.S. oil consumption is on the order of 20 million barrels per day in a world that consumes almost 100 million barrels of oil per day. Given that oil is a global commodity and gasoline prices depend on global oil prices — per Biden’s own Department of Energy — it’s difficult to imagine how a temporary one percent increase in the global oil supply is going to make any difference at the gas pump.
Given the foregoing, the only way to reduce gasoline prices is to significantly ramp up supply. And the only way to do that is to increase domestic oil production. Is Joe Biden doing anything about that?
His first day in office he issued an executive order stopping the leasing and permitting of new oil and gas drilling on public lands. When a federal court ordered him to resume the leasing process he reluctantly conducted one auction, but then stopped again because another federal court put a stop to his plans to use a dubious metric called the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) in the oil and gas leasing approval process.
