Joe Biden, oil reserves, and green tech

Joe Biden should know by now that Americans blame him, not “spoilsport” oil companies nor Russians, for high fuel prices. That’s from a Quinnipiac poll, and no one ever accused Quinnipiac University of shilling for the fossil-fuel industry. So now he’s about to do two desperate things: release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and order domestic production of “green tech” raw materials. The first shows that no one close to him has crunched the numbers, while the second smacks of communism.

Joe Biden deliberately created the problem

Let’s review. Three weeks ago, your editor outlined how Joe Biden deliberately created an energy squeeze. He cut production and canceled a key transportation project. His boycott of Russia (if that’s even real) was an excuse to cut oil supplies further. He told us during his campaign that he would cut oil production, and he did. And he did it because he is all-in on the Green Agenda.

But that won’t fly anymore, and he knows it. If Quinnipiac University didn’t brief him, Jen Psaki surely ran weeping to her workstation to bat out a report about how she’s going bat-Sierra crazy trying to defend the indefensible. I certainly would, in her place.

So now Joe Biden wants to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

All that to say: Joe Biden has painted himself into a corner, and he knows it. So what’s he going to do? Well, it looks as if he’s going to release up to a million barrels a day from the Strategic Petroleun Reserve. We get this from the Financial Times, CNN, CNBC, Time, and the New York Post, and also from the Twitterverse.

RedState asks, reasonably, what good that’s going to do. We already use twenty million barrels a day as it is. Another million barrels might lower the price at the pump by – what? – eighteen cents. Eighteen cents. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot does he think he’s kidding?

And it gets worse. That oil is dirty by now, so regulations wouldn’t even allow refining it here. So it will go to China and India. Oh, did I forget to mention? China and India have joined Russia in a parallel oil market among those three civilizational states. Oil for them will translate to fuel for their use, not ours. And if we want to buy refined products back from them, we’ll have to pay in rubles, yuan (rhymes with fawn), or rupees. Though they might decide to sell us nothing – not one kopeck, not one fen, not one paisa, not one drop.

Defense Production Act

And it gets worse. From The Washington Post we now learn that Joe Biden wants to invoke the Defense Production Act.

Someone must have told him of all the raw materials that Tesla and other EV makers need to make their cars. They include lithium, nickel, cobalt (though Elon, give the man credit, is working to do without that metal), and a whole host of other minerals.

Now for the benefit of those of you who want to go EV: Elon Musk understands the supply problem. He’s been moving heaven and earth, it seems, to solve it for his company. I’ve watched him buy lithium mines, work on cobalt-free battery chemistries, and in general establish factories and supply chains all on the same continents. And also to build a factory on every continent of any size. Gigafactory Berlin is now open for production and delivering cars throughout Europe. Terafactory Texas will likely open next month.

Now that is how entrepreneurs in a free market solve problems. They do not issue peremptory orders without a thought to whether anyone can or will carry them out. Which is what Joe Biden would be doing if he goes ahead with that Defense Production Act malarkey.

In summary

Folks, the only reason Joe Biden can even keep going is that we don’t have military cabals in this country. (At least, I don’t think we do.) Nor do we have votes-of-no-confidence and prime ministers who “go to the country,” as in the UK and Israel. Under any other system but ours, the man would be out the door right now. The man is desperate. Desperate men do desperate things, and that’s what both these measures are. In the end they will do nothing but to make an already bad situation an order of magnitude worse.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=646632413296742