As you have undoubtedly noticed, the price of gasoline has risen sharply since January and heating bills are expected to jump by as much as 54% this winter.

The cause is Economics 101: inadequate supply is driving up price.  In fact, one of President Biden’s senior energy advisors has acknowledged this and called on non-American producers to increase supply.

President Biden himself has repeatedly begged OPEC+ to increase supply by drilling more – most recently and incongruously, during the AGW conference in Glasgow.  His pleas have been rebuffed.

But wait, the United States has lots of oil. What about that? President Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about that exact point on November 5 by Bloomberg media’s Tom Keene. In response, Granholm laughed uproariously at Keene’s suggestion that the US increase oil production in America, actually calling it “hilarious”. (Wonder if people steeling themselves to order heating oil find hilarity in the situation.)  She went on to pretend that the United States has no oil of its own.

As you know, of course, oil is a global market.  It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is called OPEC and they made the decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning.

Hoo hah!  My sides!  (… this is where I laugh, right??)

Almost simultaneous with begging OPEC+ to increase production, President Biden announced that his administration would tighten the regulatory stranglehold on domestic fossil fuels, new sources (“carbon bomb” – cool) and existing. The effect of this, as he, or at least, whoever is moving his lips and pen knows, will be to strangle supply further and exacerbate the rising price of fossil fuels.

President Biden, of course, killed an American pipeline on his first day in office then, paradoxically, four months later, greenlighted a non-American pipeline.

The green in Secretary Granholm’s blazer, along with the cancelling of the XL pipeline and the intended new supply-choking regulations, is virtue-signaling by the Biden/Harris admin to environmental extremists. But don’t non-American sourced fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases just like American ones do? Does the Biden/Harris admin think the environmentalists don’t know this?

More to the point, the Biden/Harris admin clearly sees the need to increase supply to ease prices. This is the correct goal, inasmuch as the United States only generates 11% of manmade greenhouse gases (wonder if Secretary Granholm finds humor in that datapoint) so the impact of our going to zero emissions would be negligible at best, even stipulating that manmade greenhouse gases have any effect on the climate. Accordingly, I ask honestly: why do they preclude domestic drilling and fracking to accomplish this?