OPEC+ went ahead and cut 2 million barrels a day in production despite pathetic pleas from the Biden administration. The president and his henchmen went begging hat in hand and got nothing.
Because of Mr. Biden’s unhealthy, unscientific and hysterical obsession with climate change and his holy jihad against American fossil fuels, we find ourselves once again dependent on the oil sheikhs of the Middle East.
Wait a minute, today is OPEC+ which includes Russia. It’s another OPEC and Saudi stick in America’s eyes as rising oil prices help fund Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
In two years – really, less than two years – Joe Biden has taken this country from independence or energy dominance from former President Donald Trump to energy dependence on our adversaries. We have returned to the stone age of energy.
AMERICANS SHOULD PREPARE FOR GAS PRICES TO CONTINUE TO RISE, ANALYSTS WARN
Remember all the great fears that surrounded financial markets and the economy in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s when every OPEC meeting was shrouded in dramatic speculation because the rest of the world feared oil shortages and skyrocketing prices?
As recently as 2008, not too long ago, oil jumped to $150 a barrel largely because of OPEC and OPEC price spikes would inevitably lead to high inflation and a deep recession.
This is the situation that Joe Biden’s Green New Deal policies have put us in once again. It’s a terrible situation, it’s an unnecessary situation, it harms our energy security and our national security.
Just a few years ago, the United States was producing just over 13 million barrels a day, vastly surpassing the Saudis, Russians and everyone else. Our energy industry, the best in the world, led the game of oil, natural gas and gasoline. Now we whistle past the cemetery. This is what Biden has forged.
According to the Energy Information Administration, we should be at 14 million barrels per day right now, on our way to 15 million barrels per day by 2024.
Instead, despite record prices, we are at 11.8 million barrels in the latest monthly reading this summer. Again, before the pandemic, we were over 13 million. So we’re about one and a half million barrels short. We are also over a million barrels short of gasoline. All thanks to Biden’s war on fossils.
Another point: the number of Baker Hughes platforms, an indicator of oil and gas drilling, is only 604 today. There were over 800 during the Trump years. This is how our private companies have been forced to cut spending due to Biden’s war on permits, drilling, fracking, pipeline, refining and LNG terminals.
Closing fossil taps has jeopardized not only the economic well-being of our citizens here at home, but also our national security posture abroad. We were an energy powerhouse. Biden has now returned that powerhouse title to OPEC.
On top of that, Biden is destroying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve which was originally intended to sell oil during temporary natural disasters and to supply oil for wartime emergencies or oil embargoes. OPEC.
Instead, Biden exhausted about 50% of the SPR for political price-fixing in the election year to suppress gas costs at the pump. Here too, the Saudis have thwarted it.
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By cutting production, the Bidens will have to pay high prices to refill the oil reserve, hoisted to their own firecracker. Ironically, as OPEC moves oil prices into their so-called October surprise and gasoline prices edge up, it will be Biden’s Democrats who will pay the price at the polls.
This whole doomsday scenario is homemade by those central global warming planners who have done so much damage to our economy and our country. Thank God the cavalry is coming.
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the October 5, 2022 edition of “Kudlow”.