The news website Just the News, published a story written by Aaron Kleigman, which discusses the high costs imposed on the U.S. economy by policies imposed by President Joe Biden to limit the production, delivery, and use of fossil fuels. In an article titled “Biden’s energy policies costing U.S. economy $100 billion a year: study,” Kleigman discusses recent study by economists Stephen Moore and Casey Mulligan at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity which found that the Biden administration’s oil and gas policies have cost the U.S economy $100 billion a year. Kleigman and Just the News are to be applauded for bringing attention to this important research.
According to the study, the United States has produced far less oil and gas than it would have, given current market conditions, absent the Biden administration’s policies limiting oil and gas production and making such production more expensive. The economy is suffering as a result.
Discussing the study, Kleigman writes:
“The U.S. would be producing between 2 and 3 million more barrels of oil a day and between 20 and 25 more billion cubic feet of natural gas under the Trump policies,” states the report, which was published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. “This translates into an economic loss — or tax on the American economy — of roughly $100 billion a year.”
The figures are based on production numbers adjusted for the energy price spikes that have occurred since President Biden entered office in 2021.
“Both the domestic and international evidence show that when we adjust for the higher international price for oil and gas, the U.S. is drilling not record amounts of oil and gas, but far below what market conditions would dictate,” Moore and Mulligan argue. “It takes a higher oil price to motivate the same supply during the Biden administration.”
Kleigman notes that the Moore and Mulligan’s report came out even as “the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its non-member allies, a coalition known as OPEC+ led by Russia and Saudi Arabia, announced Wednesday they’re going to slash oil production by 2 million barrels a day,” and just after President Biden announced he would continue to drain the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve by 1 million barrels per day for the next six months to try to lower prices. The OPEC+’s move effectively more than cancels out Biden’s sales from the reserve. As a result of Biden’s failed diplomacy, oil prices are on the rise again.
Although Saudi Arabia has some of the lowest oil production costs in the world, the kingdom itself is very dependent on oil sales for funding the government. Estimates suggest that it requires $83 USD per barrel to stay balanced. As a result, Saudi Arabia, one of America’s greatest oil producing competitors, has a strong incentive to keep prices high.
Biden’s policies, as detailed by Climate Realism here, here, and here, for instance, have hindered American energy production, handing control of oil prices back to OPEC and OPEC+, after Trump made the United States energy independent.
Many of Biden’s actions hampering domestic energy production were reported in a report from The Heartland Institute:
- Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline
- Restricting drilling in parts of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and federal lands
- Placing a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal land
- Rescinding energy production leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
- Plans to close nearly half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska
- Stringent new regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas production
- Classifying residual water from oil and gas drilling as toxic waste
- Considering hiking royalties paid to the federal government by fossil-fuel companies
The Biden administration’s restrictions on fossil fuel development have had a notable cooling effect on investment in oil and gas projects, as the recent report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity shows. In sadly all too typical fashion, the corporate media has largely ignored this important story because it goes against the narrative they have spun for the past few decades that oil and gas companies are destroying the earth by bringing about climate change. Thanks, Just the News, for bringing attention to this important study which tells the truth about the continuing criticality of fossil fuels to modern civilization and economic progress.
https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
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This is deliberate policy by the clowns around Biden.
Why?
After watching the application of socialism in third world countries, I am left to conclude that destruction of the normal economy, leaving the working class with less, but increasingly dependent on meager government handouts, is the way to guarantee votes for the socialists.
Tut-tut, Ron you forgot about the destruction of the middle classes. Or I think Bourgeoisie as Karl and Vladymir Illyich were fond of chanting. Good for the political bosses who crack the whips at the circus of the absurd though.
It’s part of the plan to take down Capitalism. They can’t do it legitimately so they use lies spread by their media.
Yes, see above.
Why is policy that makes everything more expensive without any increase in productivity or efficiency seen as desirable for Americans? There must be an exceptional reason that so far has gone unexplained. Has life expectancy increased? No, it has gone down. Has personal wealth increased? No, it has gone down. Have serious disease rates decreased? No, they have gone up. Are better quality goods and services available? Hardly, its all cheap Chinese crap.
Remember, people who lower your standard of living are not your friends.
A great explanation as to the “WHY” aspect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPlQ-ANUCuc&t=478s
9:26 of time well spent
This is intentional…
And it hurts blue collar workers the most.
You can call it fantasy or you can call it fetish.
A cult like agenda.
It all adds up to de-industrial policy… which will lower American living standards.
Call the Democrats out for this policy… tell them we want our living standards to go up not down!
You are in deep shit when a policy designed to push prices into hyperinflation is called an Anti Inflation Bill. Orwell could not have imagined the degree of doublethinklthat that involves
What makes the use of that term so egregious and sinister is that it is not the result of some economic misreading or misunderstanding but a carefully considered and cynical attempt to deceive voters.
And it appears to have worked
AND WOKED
deeper shit when the accepted correction to the inflation that was caused by the ‘anti inflation bill’ is to increase interest rates to such an extent that it essentially takes away what was given out in the ‘anti inflation bill’ give-aways in the first place.
It seems to be a ‘talent’ that progressives have for redefining words. What they don’t realize is that words come to be associated with the things they are linked to, not the other way around. That coincides with my personal definition of an unethical act: Trading a short-term gain for an actual or potential long-term loss, as in lying or theft.
Joe Biden, in his first speech after getting the Democrat Party nomination, said all who supported/backed Trump had to be punished. And here we are, globally.
“Joe Biden, in his first speech after getting the Democrat Party nomination, said all who supported/backed Trump had to be punished. And here we are, globally.”
What utter garbage you talk. Another lie from the “king of nonsense.” It seems to be a speciality of yours….
Even the BS artist Trump would not say something so ludicrous (one would hope).
Ahhh, the lie spewing liar simple toddled in to spew yet more lies.
I’m gonna take your failure to provide any proof that what you said is true as an admission that you lied. And the telling thing here is you get upvoted for spewing garbage. Oh well I guess that is the WUWT way.
Poor little simpleminded. You say he did not say what he said, on national TV, in front of the entire country. Prove he did not say it. Naw, all you will do is spew lies, lie spewing liar, that is all you got.
What a silly childish person you are…….
Yes, simple, you are.
I rest my case….
Yes, yet again you spew lies and nothing else. You claim Joe Biden did not say exactly what he said, on national TV, and fail to prove he did not say exactly what he said, on national TV. So, you have lied again. Why? Lies are all you have. Your case at rest, liar.
What an Olympic level plonker you are…. Keep digging fool. How’s that Ford Lightning going?
And all you do is spew lies. Oh, and up voting your own comments is what a plonker does, clearly. And where are all those pics of you in your plug in toy truck? Oh, yea, that was all lies you spewed, too.
Haha keep digging man boy… I have not lied here and you do it regularly. The thing is your lies are so easy to spot. Biden said this… except he didn’t and you hade no proof. “I rode in an electric truck it was hopeless” except they hadn’t been released so you made that one up too. Your turn, when have I lied?
And you lie again. Lies are all you got.
Keep in mind that the JoeBama cabal’s policies are not to benefit the American citizens, they are to benefit the WEF and the globalist elites. Once you have that concept in mind, everything they do makes perfect sense from their standpoint.
It does make sense from that point of view. Are we paranoiac? Yes, but that does not mean that they are not all out to get us. The question is – Are we paranoiac enough?
Just because I am paranoid doesn’t mean they are not all out to get me.
AND
Just because i am a conspiracy theorist doesn’t mean there is not a conspiracy.
I agree with the premise of the article that US energy production would be higher under a second Trump term. But I find the claimed volumes to be excessive. The shale producers recognize that US shale production has limits. Initial production rates per well have been coming down for the last year. Many large producers are running out of Tier 1 acreage to drill. Thus the need to maintain current production levels rather than trying to accelerate production. Without discovery of a new US shale basin or some unforeseen technical breakthrough, US shale oil production could peak in the next couple of years.
The irony of Biden’s policies is this: if solar and wind were abundant enough and reliable enough to make up the shortfall, and more nuclear and hydro development was taking place, there might be some justification to his actions. But when the first two are strictly hit-or-miss, and the next ones are pure anathema to the environmentalists, it sounds as though the Democrats are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Meanwhile it’s the consumer who’s getting the shaft.
A frequent cliche is ‘follow the money’. Where is this money going (the extra billions us normal people are paying for the same amount of energy)? Where?????????
They are also spending $379 Billion that will actually make energy prices more expensive according to a recent report
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/democrats-face-a-green-energy-fiasco/ar-AA12PjA3
Only $100 billion—Chump change when you have $31 trillion in Federal debt to which you must add State & Local government debt, unfunded government pension liability & unfunded government retiree health care.💸
How dare them thar ayrabs reduce oil production like we’re doing-
‘Enough is enough’: After humiliating OPEC oil cuts, US re-evaluates relationship with Saudi Arabia (msn.com)
We’re the omniscient ones that want to get to zero oil production so naff off uppity ayrabs or else!
The cost is much higher than this study indicates.
It is not only the loss of tax income of $100 billion a year.
It is also the loss of jobs and the much higher cost to the consumer.
I wish the authors had put a number on both of these.
Perhaps an informed reader can?
Sorry, but 100B is a gross underestimate. Biden’s energy policy is directly responsible for most of the inflation we’ve seen over the last 2 years. Inflation is running at about 8% per year the last 2 years and 8% of a 23T economy is 170B. Also add the number of jobs lost in the energy sector, small businesses that closed because of energy costs, and other businesses that curtailed capital investment due to the recession. These would easily put us over 200B. Furthermore, rather than taking a rational, balanced approach to climate change, he is leading us toward future costly and horrific ecological disasters and the destabilization of our electric grid through the indiscriminate addition of intermittent utility wind and solar power and wholesale replacement of gasoline powered vehicles by electric vehicles.
There are other geopolitical issues that don’t have a price tag that have been caused in part by Biden’s energy policies. By suppressing domestic production of oil and gas, he gave Putin more courage to invade Ukraine given the corresponding increase in western reliance on Russian oil and gas. He’s tried to jawbone the Saudis and OPEC into producing more, but by coddling Iran (the enemy of the Saudis), he’s antagonized them into cutting supply. He’s been begging Iran and Venezuela – 2 hostile regimes to western Democratic values – to produce more oil, allowing them the continue subsidizing their state-sponsored terrorism and the exportation of Marxism around Latin America.
Biden is Obama 2.0 – most of his top advisors are from the Obama administration, and they continue to try to remake the US economic and political system into a socialist dystopia.
Meanwhile Putin is consolidating ownership of international oil investments in Sakhalin after asset seizures. He waited until the project investments were far along before the asset grab. Maybe they can drill horizontally to Alaska. /sarc
India will weigh what Russia has to offer on Sakhalin-1 ownership revamp | Reuters
An important point – this is not just *Biden’s* policies. This is the DEMOCRAT’S policies. They OWN this mass stupidity, and not one of them should ever be allowed to even ATTEMPT to wash the stink of it off unless they spoke out against AND voted against every damn piece of it!
Of course, none of this is a concern to Biden and the rest of the political / cultural elite and the rest of the wealthy, because these people have enough money to mitigate most if not all of the negative effects. The rest of us? Not so much…
This likely vastly understates the cost… Manufacturers who decide not to reshore or expand, increased costs of any good that is transported, multiplier effects from income earned by energy industry workers, reputational damages to US abroad when we are seen as unreliable partners for energy and indeed beggars, and the risk of draining the SPR, to name a few. This administration is a disaster.
(obligatory FJB)