We’re old enough to remember when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said during a CNN town hall that “we’re gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” (She later said she “misspoke.”) It just goes to show that what President Joe Biden is doing isn’t new. As a candidate, he promised he was going to go after fossil fuels. During the debates, he said he was going to “transition” from the oil industry — and “transition” is a word we’re hearing a lot from the Biden administration recently when asked about rising gas prices; both Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have mentioned the country being in a transition period to green energy.
President Biden has said that it’s not true that his policies are holding back domestic energy production, and since we can’t count on the mainstream fact-checkers to debunk that, we have Drew Holden with one of his great threads:
🧵THREAD🧵
President Biden recently said “it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”
I figure the fact checkers likely won’t touch this one, so I did the homework.
Biden’s claim isn’t true. I explain. ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/dLfbeP7WFt
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Just two weeks ago, Biden froze new drilling permits and stopped leases on federal lands because a court ruled that they couldn’t use an elevated “social cost of carbon” to make it more difficult to drill.
Instead, they shut the whole process down: https://t.co/qI5W9LYZmI
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
This opposition to domestic energy production isn’t new. When Biden first took office, he moved to ban new oil and gas leases on federal land (a huge slice of US energy) via executive order.
The measure was eventually stopped by the courts. https://t.co/YYB892TBAi
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Back before gas prices hit record highs, Biden’s allies were praising the Admin for taking bold steps to limit fossil fuel production.
One of their key points? We, supposedly, already had enough supply “to meet domestic needs.”https://t.co/XykMTgCPGH
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Biden also proposed ending a wide range of tax benefits for drilling and exploration, something supporters said would hopefully “discourage additional oil and gas development.”
This makes the process more expensive, particularly when competing with heavily subsidized renewables. pic.twitter.com/w4fS3iI4uy
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
And I’m sure that no one has forgotten that Biden shutdown the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office.
But what you may have forgotten was that this was part of a broader suite of efforts to “reverse ‘more than 100’ Trump-era policies.” https://t.co/5YqxDldQQE pic.twitter.com/NwhKbnze22
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Taken together, these early moves represent what climate activist Bill McKibben said “may well mark the official beginning of the end of the fossil-fuel era” arguing “they send a decisive signal about the end of one epoch and the beginning of another.” https://t.co/mOwnGo7bQq pic.twitter.com/eaMJ9PUfrf
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
In June of 2021, Biden suspended oil and gas leases that the Trump Admin had granted in Alaska, outraging local officials and ending one of the key actions Trump took to expand domestic energy production. https://t.co/VLsRmao1N9
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
All of these federal efforts came with a clear goal in mind: sending a signal that the days of fossil fuels would be ending soon.
Again, once upon a time, the corporate press was comfortable admitting this was the goal:https://t.co/IRkBmQHjTS
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
These signals matter.
Extractive industries like oil & gas rely heavily on tea-leaf-reading, because even seemingly small gov’t actions can have huge impacts for a heavily regulated industry. A quick, easy-to-follow breakdown of some of the reasons here: https://t.co/Yp3b2SB2Og
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
And it wasn’t just Biden acting on his own.
As @SaysSimonson wrote about for @FreeBeacon, Dems in Congress have pushed to restrict domestic energy production even as prices have climbed:https://t.co/1IePRV4NbW
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Congressional Dems have also taken steps to add tighter (and in some cases, just punitive) regulations that make it harder for domestic energy companies to do business, including regs on offshore oil & regarding methane.
Naturally, making a process harder increases the cost. pic.twitter.com/IwrT454L4J
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
And there were numerous hearings where Democrats have demonized the oil and gas industry in colorful but seriously dubious ways, making the industry’s standing on that side of the aisle clear. pic.twitter.com/cqwalOqdnN
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Plus, something that gets left out of the current discourse is that numerous states have banned or proposed banning fracking, an effective way to access hard-to-reach energy sources.
I’ll give you one guess which politically party was behind these efforts. pic.twitter.com/DHoHoZOXW4
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Now, to be clear, the impacts of some of these efforts have been overblown.
Despite trying to ban new drilling on federal lands, lots of plans have moved forward to do so – more than under President Trump’s first year (largely b/c of Obama-era rules), but fewer than last year. pic.twitter.com/smVuE47qXc
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
And it isn’t reasonable to blame Biden – or any president – exclusively for the price of oil and gas. The world is just more complicated than that.
Here’s a good primer on some of that complexity: https://t.co/huY5fg56Bq
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
But it’s intellectually disingenuous for President Biden to pretend that he and his party haven’t taken action to make domestic energy production more difficult and, as a result, have made energy more expensive.
They’ve done a lot with the explicit goal of doing just that.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
The inconvenient truth is that Biden campaigned on ambitious climate goals. Those aren’t likely to get done organically, so he and his administration have tried to apply pressure to traditional energy sources.
Now that prices have jumped, they’re trying to pretend otherwise.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
Increased costs have always been a good-faith concern about climate efforts among lots of people, left, right and center.
Biden and his team ignored those warnings and helped make the bed they find themselves laying.
Rather than admit that, now they’re trying to memoryhole it.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) March 10, 2022
If nothing else, no one is going to forget Biden killing off the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office.
Related:
Looks like Joe Biden and Democrats have settled on a fun new phrase to dodge responsibility for gas prices https://t.co/jUFdQ1J49i
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 9, 2022
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