Here’s the Diagnosis: Stop Putin by Ending the War on Fossil Fuels

Jen Psaki is dead wrong when she claims we don’t need more oil and gas in America, that we need to wean ourselves off it.

AP/Wayne Parry
Energy industry officials and state leaders in red states are adopting clean-energy technology such as wind farms for economic, not social justice, reasons. AP/Wayne Parry

If you listen to the White House press secretary, President Biden’s critics are “misdiagnosing” the problem vis-a-vis President Putin and his oil and gas. 

Jen Psaki claims we don’t need more oil and gas in America. We need to wean ourselves off it, she says. Reopening the fossil fuels spigot is not the answer.

Well, Madam Psaki is wrong. Dead wrong. 

Just ask Germany and Europe, which decided to go green. That didn’t work — their economies slumped, and they even had to go back to coal. Ultimately, they are hostage to Russian natural gas.

America shouldn’t be held hostage to Russian natural gas, or anything else for that matter.

Mr. Biden has not yet sanctioned Russian energy companies or energy lending banks, but he has sanctioned the entire American fossil fuel industry. That’s his mistake.

In addition to ending the Keystone pipeline, stopping drilling in Alaska, raising drilling fees on public lands, and generally insulting our energy companies at every turn — as he did last Thursday — now the Interior Department has frozen all new leases on federal lands. 

The Energy Department has frozen six applications for LNG exports, four of which would go to Europe. FERC, the SEC, and quite possibly the Federal Reserve are all waging a jihad against fossil fuel companies. This is madness.

We’re still pumping less than 12 million barrels of oil per day. We should be moving toward 14 million, and then 15 million.

Our natural gas and LNG is the cheapest and cleanest in the world.

Turning on all the spigots full throttle should be our policy right now. That would reduce prices for world oil and domestic gasoline, and would undermine Mr. Putin’s war financing.

How Mr. Biden can’t see this is beyond me. 

Solar panels and wind turbines are not going to defeat Mr. Putin. Gearing up energy independence for the world’s greatest energy industry will defeat him.

Don’t forget: Sky-high oil prices empower the Russian dictator. In 2008, with prices at $150 a barrel, he took Georgia. In 2014, at $100 a barrel, he took Crimea. This past year, after going to $100 from $50, for an $84 billion profit, he has invaded Ukraine — and there is no telling where else he will go.

Those are the cold, hard facts of history.

America and Europe have finally done the right thing in sanctioning Russia’s central bank. That neutralizes its $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves. The ruble has collapsed. Other investment sanctions will badly damage Russia’s economy.

However, don’t forget: We have not sanctioned Rosneft and Gazprom, nor some of the energy lending banks, so Mr. Putin’s oil and gas war-financing scam continues.

We’re going to have to make a tough call pretty soon about this, unless the brave Ukrainians can somehow stop Mr. Putin’s war machine. But this whole problem was brought on by radical-left, green new deal policies, and of course the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

These problems are of Mr. Biden’s own making. We’ll see what he says tomorrow night in his State of the Union address.

No matter what Mr. Biden and his cronies may say, though, the problem is not America, the problem is not Jimmy Carter’s American malaise. The problem is a malaise in the Biden administration, with big-government socialist policies that the American people have completely rejected.

The American people are alive and well. The cavalry is coming. Save America.


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