We Have Gone Back To The Energy Stone Age

OPEC+ went ahead and slashed 2 million barrels a day from production despite the pathetic entreaties from the Biden administration. The President and his minions went begging hat in hand — and got nothing.

Because of Mr. Biden’s misbegotten, unscientific, hysterical obsession over climate change and his holy jihad against American fossil fuels, we now find ourselves once again dependent on the Middle Eastern oil sheikhs.

Yet, wait a minute, it’s OPEC+ nowadays — that includes Russia. That’s another OPEC-Saudi stick in the eye to America, since higher oil prices help finance Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

In two years — really, less than two years — Mr. Biden has taken this country from President Donald Trump’s energy independence, or dominance, to a state of energy dependence on our adversaries. We have gone back to the energy Stone Age.

Remember all the great knee-knocking fears surrounding financial markets and the economy in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the early 2000s, when every OPEC meeting was surrounded by high-drama speculation because the rest of the world feared oil shortages and sky-high prices?

As recently as 2008, not so long ago, oil jumped to $150 a barrel largely because of OPEC, and OPEC price spikes would inevitably lead to high inflation and deep recession.

That is the situation Mr. Biden’s Green New Deal policies have put us into once again. It is a terrible situation. It is an unnecessary situation. It damages our energy security and our national security.

Only a few Trump years ago, America was producing slightly more than 13 million barrels a day, outstripping the Saudis and the Russians and everybody else by a wide margin.

Our best-in-the-world energy industry was calling the tune on oil and natural gas and gasoline. Now we are whistling past the graveyard. This is what Mr. Biden has wrought.

According to the Energy Information Administration, we should be at 14 million barrels a day right now, on our way to 15 million barrels a day by 2024.

Instead, despite record-high prices, we are at 11.8 million barrels in the last monthly reading this summer. Again, pre-pandemic we were over 13 million. So, we’re about a million and a half barrels short. We are also over a million barrels short of gasoline. All this thanks to Biden's war on fossils.

Another point: the Baker Hughes rig count, an indicator of oil and gas drilling, is only 604 today. It was more than 800 during the Trump years. That’s how our private companies have been forced to cut back because of Mr. Biden’s war on permitting, drilling, fracking, pipelining, refining, and LNG terminals.

Closing the fossil spigots has jeopardized not only the economic welfare of our citizens here at home, but our national security posture abroad. We were an energy powerhouse. Mr. Biden now has given that powerhouse title back to OPEC.

On top of that, Mr. Biden is destroying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that was originally meant to pitch in oil sales during temporary natural disasters and supply oil during wartime emergencies or OPEC oil embargoes.

Instead, Mr. Biden has depleted roughly 50 percent of the strategic petroleum reserve — for political election-year price-fixing to suppress gasoline costs at the pump. Here, too, the Saudis have outwitted him.

The Saudis cutting production means that the Bidens will have to pay high prices to refill the petroleum reserve. Hoisted on their own petard.

Ironically, as OPEC moves oil prices in their so-called October surprise, and gas prices edge higher, it is the Biden Democrats who will pay a price at the polls.

This whole catastrophic scenario is homemade by these global warming central planners who have done so much damage to our economy and our country. Thank goodness the cavalry is coming.

Larry Kudlow was the Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump from 2018-2021. His Fox Business show "Kudlow" airs at 4 p.m &. and his radio show airs on 770 ABC from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

From Larry Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.