Biden campaigned against American oil and gas, saying he would “end fossil fuels” with no more pipelines and “no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the industry to continue to drill.”
Within a week of taking office, Biden banned the Keystone XL pipeline and suspended oil and gas leasing on federal lands — the latter move was subsequently overturned in late August by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The regulatory assault has been unrelenting as well.
Meanwhile, Biden’s allies in woke finance are working to dry up the capital needed to find more oil and gas and then produce and refine it. As a result, America is producing about 1 million barrels a day less oil than it did under former President Donald Trump (before the onset of Covid-19).
Coincidentally, that 1-million-barrel shortfall is about the same amount of oil Biden has been withdrawing from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
Congress created the SPR in 1975 after the oil shocks of the 1970s led to gas lines and stagflation. Situated underground in giant caverns associated with salt domes in Louisiana and Texas, the SPR was rapidly filled to about 600 million barrels by 1990. It reached its maximum capacity of 714 million barrels during the Great Recession when the price of oil plunged from $190 a barrel to $58.
But since Biden’s election — and especially since the White House announced an accelerated draw down of the SPR on Nov. 23, 2021 — the oil in the SPR has plummeted to levels not seen since 1984, shortly after the storage caverns became operational.