The national average price of gas soared to a record high for the fourth consecutive day on Thursday.
Increasing six cents overnight, the price of gas is now $4.318, a 59-cent increase from last week, according to AAA. Thursday’s record-setting price is the fourth consecutive day that prices have reached an all-time high.
Gas prices rose about one dollar before the run-up to the Ukrainian war and subsequently 75 cents since the invasion of Ukraine. But the White House has blamed the massive price hike only on the war, dubbing it “Putin’s price hike.” The White House has also claimed that the oil industry has 9,000 private oil fields on which to drill for oil.
“What additional permits do they need? The leases are there. The permits are there. I don’t think they need an embroidered invitation to drill,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters about the oil industry’s drilling feasibility.
Paski’s question omitted that American drillers need feasible financing teams to drill on private land. Breitbart News reported:
The cost of capital in 2022 is reportedly 20 percentage points more costly for long-cycle developments than in the past. “Ten years ago, the ‘cost of capital’ for developing oil and gas as compared to renewable projects was pretty much the same, falling consistently between 8% and 10%. But not anymore,” Bloomberg reported in November.
Oil companies have little incentive to make 10-year investments when politicians are disincentivizing the consumption of oil through renewable energy subsidies.
Biden has waged a war on both public and private financing of oil drilling while subsidizing green new deal-like energy plans. The result has been that American oil production is down from 2019, the year before the pandemic. Hard numbers suggest 2022 oil production is 12 million barrels or 8 percent less than in 2019.
The establishment media have done their best to protect the president. They have suggested Americans are willing to pay massive gas prices to defend a non-NATO ally. They have also adopted Biden’s strategy of blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for Americans’ pain at the pump.
Meanwhile, Biden has refused to open drilling on federal lands, and he shut down the Keystone Pipeline on day one of his presidency. He maintains that his domestic war on American energy has had no impact on rising gas prices.