The OPEC Dodge

J oe Biden, first elected to public office in 1972, is a determined nostalgist — first, he tried to revive 1970s-level inflation, and now he is attempting, Jurassic Park-style, to bring back from the dead one of the great dinosaurs of American politics: blaming our troubles on OPEC.

OPEC, some of you youngsters may not know, is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel of mostly Middle Eastern oil duchies that once had something like a stranglehold on global oil and gas production. The United States eventually stumbled upon a solution to relying on those rascally sheikhs for oil and gas, and we call that solution: Texas.

It’s not just Texas, of course. It’s the whole, vast North American oil-and-gas industry, which has experienced a renaissance in recent decades thanks in part to technological innovation (the bundle of techniques colloquially known as “fracking”) and in part to policy reforms that enabled the United States to do what our NAFTA allies, Mexico and Canada, already had done: develop our own energy sector.

In the 1970s, the United States was hobbled by an oil embargo that forced gasoline rationing and other drastic measures onto Americans. Imagine a situation in which you couldn’t legally go fill up your car because it wasn’t Wednesday — that was life for many Americans in that era.

And it sucked.

So we got our act together. In 2018, the United States became the world’s largest oil producer. It is also now the world’s largest producer of natural gas. (You won’t hear our greenie-weenie friends talk about it too much, but the latter change has had a desirable knock-on effect: Our emissions of greenhouse gases have decreased as cheap, relatively clean-burning natural gas has displaced relatively expensive, relatively dirty coal in a substantial share of electricity generation.)

Because of some technical issues involved in the refining and transportation of petroleum products, the United States remains a very large oil importer even as U.S. oil exports hit a record high last year. Refining and transportation — meaning pipelines and other infrastructure — are important to consumers, because consumers can’t really do much with crude oil. Consumers want diesel, gasoline, propane — and petrochemicals, polymers, plastics, and all the other stuff we make out of oil.

(You know, great petroleum-based products like . . . solar panels and wind-turbine parts. Polyester, baby!)

So, Joe Biden has doodled off to Glasgow, where he is lecturing the rest of the world on the need to stop using oil and gas . . .  someday, while also demanding that OPEC bump up its production of oil and gas right now, because gasoline prices are rising in the United States and a big spike in energy prices is expected to inflict heavy, painful home-heating bills on many Americans this winter. Biden is already picturing those “Winter of Our Discontent” headlines in the Scranton Times. He is, as the football players say, hearing footsteps.

But the United States does not have to rely on the good graces of OPEC to flood our domestic markets with oil and gas. We have oil and gas. What we need are pipelines and other infrastructure to move the stuff around — something that Joe Biden and his Democratic allies oppose. It wasn’t the Arabs who killed that big Keystone XL pipeline project — it was one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., feckless creature of Delaware and lifelong choo-choo enthusiast. The people who have their foot on the neck of the U.S. energy industry are not, for the most part, named Muhammad al-Anything — they are Chuck and Nancy and Alexandria in Washington and Kathy up in Albany.

Joe Biden wants to enjoy the moral prestige of husbanding a big climate-change deal but wants somebody else to pay the price, down the road a few years — long enough for a president who is not exactly the target market for green bananas. In fact, there are a great many world leaders in the same position: There isn’t any way to hit those “ambitious” emissions goals without major economic disruption.

The United States could, if we wanted to, create tens of thousands of good jobs in the energy sector and send gasoline prices and energy bills down so low that they could sniff the hair of Biden’s poll numbers. The United States could, if we wanted to, sign onto every fantasy currently getting an airing in Glasgow.

The United States cannot do both.

So, instead, Biden will talk big in Glasgow and blame OPEC for what’s happening at home. But you cannot base good energy policy on a lie, and you cannot base good climate policy on a lie, either. At some point, we will have to face the facts.

Texas is ready when you are, Mr. President.