U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm laughed at the nation’s high gas prices on Friday when asked about the administration’s strategy to ramp up supply to meet demand.
“[In] Sturgis, Michigan, it is $2.89 a gallon. I guess that’s better than in California,” said Bloomberg Host Tom Keene as gas prices reach all-time highs on the West Coast. “What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America?”
“That is hilarious,” Granholm said, throwing her head back with laughter as Americans cope with rising prices at the pump compounded by inflation.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm throws her head back and laughs when asked if there was a plan to bring gas prices down. pic.twitter.com/9iA3Tzje8C
— NewsBusters (@newsbusters) November 5, 2021
Granholm went on to repeat the White House line of blaming foreign adversaries for their refusal to increase output while the administration actively suppresses supply with an escalated war on at-home producers.
“[I] would that I had the magic wand on this,” Granholm said, pretending that she doesn’t in the form of regulatory power to roll back the administration’s hostility toward the industry. “Oil is a global market. It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is called OPEC, and they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning.”
Russia and member nations of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced on Thursday that they would not increase output above scheduled rises despite President Joe Biden’s repeated pleas.
At the same time, Biden is using OPEC’s refusal as a foil to evade responsibility for the crisis his administration engineered by shutting down domestic production. From day one, Biden has launched an aggressive assault on the oil and gas industry with the immediate elimination of permits for the Keystone XL pipeline and suspension of new leases on federal land.
While a federal judge overturned the White House ban on leasing, auctions will still not be held until the spring. The delay has thrown another wrench into operators’ efforts in the capital-intensive industry to invest in new drilling sites, where the high costs of entry could make extraction prohibitively expensive.
In June, Biden also put a halt on leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to an estimated 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The Interior Department later announced a new supplemental environmental review as if the existing report under the National Environmental Policy Act held as the gold standard of impact assessments were non-existent.
The cascade of taxes and regulation on the industry has not only played a part in driving up high energy prices but has also intimidated Wall Street from investing in new projects.
“We can’t get capital because they’re putting so much pressure on banks not to lend to us in the name of climate change,” explained Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Denver-based trade group Western Energy Alliance.
Despite the existing consequences of the administration’s ongoing war against domestic oil and gas producers, Biden threw another wrench at the industry this week while simultaneously complaining about our adversaries’ refusal to pump more oil.
While in Glasgow for the global summit on climate, the president unveiled new methane rules, which promise to drive energy costs even higher and suppress production. The regulations seek to reduce methane emissions, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, by 30 percent before the end of the decade. With economic incentives to capture methane already in place, the industry has cut methane emissions 23 percent since 1990 even as production of oil and gas increased.
Granholm, however, thinks questions about the administration’s power to bring down soaring gas prices are “hilarious.”
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