Below, Andrew points out that President Biden’s oil diplomacy isn’t going so well. Despite the humiliation of Biden’s fist-bump with a man he pledged to make a pariah, Saudi Arabia and OPEC are actually slightly reducing production, and they aim to keep the price of oil around $100 per barrel.
The obvious way to mitigate the power of foreign oil producers is to enact policies to increase domestic production, but that’s not happening either.
You may recall that in March, Biden boasted, “We’re approaching record levels of oil and gas production in the United States, and we’re on track to set a record of oil production next year.”
No thanks to Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Biden’s administration has nearly ceased leasing land for oil production offshore and on federal land, even as gas prices reached record levels:
The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.
That’s about 2.8 percent of the previous early-Nixon-era low.