Biden's Misfire on Gas Prices

We're becoming increasingly convinced that neither the White House or Congressional Democrats have a coherent plan for anything. They're just reacting to stuff

Publisher’s Riff

We get it: in the moment that skyrocketing gas prices put a hurt on everyone’s pocket - well, at least on people who drive everywhere, especially those who do it for a living - policymakers want to look as responsive as possible. However, is releasing a million barrells a day from the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and relying on that alone as the main strategy, really the right move? Some rough notes on why it’s not …

• Top thought: there’s no guarantee gas prices will drop. There’s no certainty, at all, that releasing gas reserves will help. Policymakers, including presidents, have no control over gas price fluctuations or settings - oil and gas companies and their markets do. This move gives the false public impression that President Biden can wave a magic wand and bend the fossil fuel markets to his will. The reality is that he can’t. So, this exercise is for no more than quick political show that will result in maybe a few months of 10 to 35 cents off of every gallon, but nothing much from there.

• This is the worst time to release more fossil fuel into the environment. Planet’s condition getting worse? Oh, that’s right: just release more of the culprit substance to consumers and encourage more driving as the planet, literally, melts from the continued surge of climate crisis. We’re within the event horizon and on the cusp of no return and irreparable destruction to our global habitat - that, yes, includes every place we live, work and play - as a result of our addiction to fossil fuel use. Watching the consequences of poisoning our environment unfold, we’re still insisting on poisoning it even further. Not a good look.

• Which means: Biden, who keeps attempting to fashion himself as the climate president, should have been extremely honest and much more forceful in the environmental messaging while announcing the release of oil reserves. Sample: “I am reluctantly, let me repeat, reluctantly doing this as an immediate, short term measure. Fossil fuels, clearly, have shown they are both a national security threat and a planetary threat, so we really need to get off of them much sooner rather than later.”

• He could have used this moment to make a bold tipping point pitch for clean energy. This could have been that pivot - a recognition that we are in a recovery period and, of course, can’t shut the economy down, but we’re opening up fossil fuel spigots temporarily on condition that we’re, immediately, investing in an aggressive ramp up of clean energy infrastructure.

• Indeed: Biden could have publicly met with clean energy executives as he announced the oil reserve release to show how reluctant he is to do it. But, there’s still time: use the moment to cement commitments from clean energy leaders and investors that they’ll accelerate the expansion of clean energy.

• Now is the time, also, to put fossil fuel executives on the spot: 1) call them out for price gouging, finally tell the public the full, unadulterated truth about who controls gas prices while, 2) pushing them to make the necessary investments in eliminating methane gas release (which is what’s accelerating climate crisis) and, finally 3) asking them what it would take for them to transition to a renewable energy portfolio.

• The line from the White House and Congressional Democrats shouldn’t be “energy independence.” That’s just intellectual laziness: and it’s borrowing from the mostly Republican messaging strategists employed by the oil and gas lobby We don’t need energy independence. What we really need is to pave the way to total clean energy dependence.

• What we’re seeing here, in a moment of gas price hysteria, is both the Biden White House and Congressional Democrats (and their surrogates) not having a coherent plan. They’re just reacting to hype.

• Ultimately, if the presidential bully pulpit is wielded effectively, drowning out the frantic gas-price noise, the president could: 1) stress to Americans that the way is not more gas use, it’s less gas consumption and an emergency pivot to clean energy (that creates jobs faster), 2) publicly hold oil and gas companies accountable for price gouging and 3) create momentum for an emergency climate crisis response plan. That hasn’t happened, yet.