White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain — the guy who reportedly pulls the strings behind the scene — was trying to brag about gas prices coming down some even though they are still far higher than they were under President Donald Trump.
Of course, Klain being part of the Biden team, he can’t help but spin — the national average is still over $3.75.
While they falsely tried to blame Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for the gas prices going up, they want all the credit for prices coming down a bit. But these claims aren’t going to age well, for a few reasons.
First, they haven’t addressed the real problems; they’ve just tried to artificially suppress the real price with releases for the past six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves as they empty our emergency supplies to help the Democrats’ chances of winning in November. Some of our reserves even went to China. That’s leaving our reserves at the lowest levels in almost 40 years — that’s also concerning. The Biden administration said they would be doing that for six months, starting March 31. So that’s going to end soon, which may contribute to the prices going back up.
Second, the drop in prices has been largely attributed to lower demand and fears of recession, not anything that the Biden team did to resolve any of the underlying issues.
Meanwhile, rather than concentrating on increasing our production, Joe Biden went to Saudi Arabia — hat in hand — begging for OPEC to produce more in an embarrassing display. Even a Saudi Arabian prince mocked Biden calling him “much diminished” and saying essentially the problem was Biden cut pipelines and hurt the U.S. ability to produce.
Now, the word is that OPEC is going to be cutting production by 100,000 barrels a day, in a smackdown to Joe Biden.
Naturally, that caused oil prices to jump.
U.S. crude rose 3.3%, to $89.79 per barrel, while international benchmark Brent was up 3.7%, to $96.50, after the decision.
The amount of oil per day “may seem negligible, but the message from today’s cut is clear: OPEC+ thinks they’ve fallen enough,” Columbia University energy policy expert Jason Bordoff tweeted.
That just shows how little respect they have for Biden, despite his pleading. It also shows again — because of Joe Biden’s policies that attack the energy industry — we are subject again to the whims of OPEC, rather than having more energy independence as we had under President Donald Trump.
The White House response was clueless, in a statement supposedly responding to OPEC but with no reference to the OPEC move or any real answer to deal with it.
This is on top of the European energy crisis, with Russia turning the screws on them as we reported, cutting off Nord Stream. Trump told Germany they were getting themselves in trouble with reliance on Russia and Germany laughed. Now they’re likely to go cold this winter and have real problems. We have the supply and the ability to provide for both our needs and our allies in Europe — if we just went back to encouraging production and independence, instead of relying on foreign oil and bad energy policy.
But that would require competence in the White House and that’s unfortunately not what we have there right now.