On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) stated that President Joe Biden has starved energy producers of capital through signals like “regulation, taxation, flirting with Maduro in Venezuela, or the ayatollah in Iran to fill the voids.”
Cramer said energy producers are “capital-starved, largely based on signals being sent by the Biden administration on a regular basis. I mean, the nomination of various members of the Federal Reserve, for example. … There’s a chilling effect on every move. This tends to get oversimplified sometimes…the Keystone XL pipeline’s not going to be built and it’s not going to make a difference. But it’s a symbol of the larger issue of really bad signals being sent, whether it’s through regulation, taxation, flirting with Maduro in Venezuela, or the ayatollah in Iran to fill the voids.”
He continued, “North Dakota’s down about 400 to 500,000 barrels per day from our peak, and if the right capital messages were being sent to the markets, I think we could pick up another couple hundred to 400 thousand barrels per day. But the investors have to get the right message. And this has to be a mid-term play — mid-term to long-term play. You can’t simply say, okay, we’re going to allow drilling now for the next couple of months, go ahead and invest hundreds of millions of dollars. We ought to have a long-term play on the transition to — if you will, to renewables, and we should agree to that, and at the same time, meet the moment and meet the crisis. And by the way, could we just ground John Kerry’s airplane and not send him out to talk?”
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