February 28, 2023

On the last Friday of January, the Republican House of Representatives passed a bill aimed at curtailing the president’s ability to exploit the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for partisan ends.  If enacted, the bill would require that, except in a “severe energy supply disruption,” any drawdown of the reserve would need to be accompanied by a plan to open up new federal lands for oil and gas leases “by the same percentage as the percentage of petroleum … that is to be drawn down.”

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President Biden has already made clear that he would veto the bill if it made it to his desk, which it won’t, because the Democrats control the Senate.

Why do Republicans think a bill like this is necessary?  Because over the last two years, Biden has repeatedly timed selloffs from the oil reserve for political reasons, especially in the run-up to last November’s elections, when his party was trying extra hard to make sure that oil and gasoline were cheap.  By now, the reserve has shrunk to 380 million barrels, its lowest level since 1984.

And what is to be blamed for this?  According to Biden, it is the greed of the oil companies, who, in order to keep the price high, are pumping too little oil to meet America’s needs.  “It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering,” he said in October, “meet their responsibilities in this country, and give the American people a break.”

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This is a bit odd, because before the present spike in the oil price, Democrats still thought that oil companies were evil and greedy…but mostly because they were destroying the climate by producing so much oil.  And when President Biden took office back in 2021, he acted accordingly, by re-entering the Paris Climate Accord, halting oil and gas leasing on federal lands, and canceling the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, all within eight days of being sworn in.

Democrats’ relationship with petroleum, and with fossil fuels in general, is complicated.  They often run for office by saying that carbon emissions are the number-one threat to life on this planet, but, with a few exceptions, they still like to drive, and fly, and otherwise enjoy lifestyles that couldn’t exist without cheap energy.

So they try to split the difference.  They harass American energy-producers.  They ban drilling on public lands or in the Gulf of Mexico whenever their party is in office.  They support the laws that allow private environmental activists to jet around the country and sue the builders of pipelines, mines, and other energy infrastructure, forcing them to reopen their permitting process midway through construction, a process that can delay the projects by years and cost thousands of jobs.

But the wrath of the establishment left is reserved entirely for the producers of fossil fuels, the hardworking Americans who work long hours in coal mines or on drilling rigs to keep our economy supplied with its most essential resources.  They have no interest at all in going after the consumers of fossil fuels — not when Democrats know deep down that their own lifestyles depend just as heavily on fossil fuels as anyone else’s, and not when so many of the most profligate consumers of energy, like the 1,500 or so plutocrats who flew private jets to last month’s Davos conference, are hardcore progressives.

This is puzzling, because if you actually think that CO2 emissions are the number-one threat to human existence right now, then you should care at least as much about fossil fuel consumption as about fossil fuel production.  After all, a molecule of CO2 spewed out of the tail pipe of an American automobile (or out of the smokestack of an American power plant, or out of the exhaust plume of somebody’s private jet) is going to have the same atmospheric affects whether that carbon was originally mined orpumped in America or somewhere else.

And yet we never see anybody proposing to reduce emissions by imposing tariffs on imported fossil fuels — something that could at least be sold to economic nationalists on the right on the grounds that it would drive up the demand for American labor and reduce our country’s strategic dependence on potential foes.