Biden Administration Cedes Power on Gas Prices to OPEC

November 3, 2021

In the category of “Are You Kidding Me?”, PTF would submit the comments of Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm from this past weekend. The Financial Times has the report:

The Biden administration’s senior energy official on Sunday blamed the Opec oil “cartel” for soaring petrol prices in the US, putting more pressure on the group to increase crude output ahead of a meeting later this week.

“Gas prices of course are based on a global oil market. That oil market is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is Opec,” said Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, on NBC’s Meet the Press. “So that cartel has more say about what is going on.” 

US petrol prices have risen almost 40 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House, adding to anxieties about inflation. The federal Energy Information Administration recently forecast winter household heating bills would also surge this year.

Granholm’s comments ignore the fact that it is the Biden administration’s policies that have put OPEC in charge of global oil supplies. The United States had achieved energy independence, and President Biden threw it away in a misguided effort to appease radical environmentalists.

Last month, PTF highlighted an op-ed from The Wall Street Journal authored by Walter Russell Mead that eloquently explained what the Biden administration has created:

America’s greatest single achievement of the past decade was replacing the Middle East as the swing producer in world energy production, shifting a critical lever of economic power from authoritarian monopolists to market-driven capitalists. To throw this achievement away means, among other things, the return of the Middle East to the center of the American foreign policy agenda …

When you hear the President or his allies blame OPEC for high gas prices, don’t forget that it was this administration who put them in charge.