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France's Emmanuel Macron Drops Truth on Joe Biden About His Insane Energy Policies

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A sea of mediocrity is currently flowing in Germany as the G7 leaders, including Joe Biden, have come together to once again virtue signal climate change and abortion, while generally making your life worse. As usual, there will be lots of tone-deaf pictures and statements, while zero real-world problems are solved. That’s the G7 in a nutshell.

But even among the Eurotrash that makes up most of the nations present, there’s only so much they can take in terms of the massive oil crunch hitting the globe. On that topic, France’s Emmanuel Macron decided to drop some truth on Biden about his insane energy policies. It was one of those moments where you can only be embarrassed that even the French have a better handle on reality than the US president.

When Macron is having to step in as a voice of reason, you know the US has fallen far off its once-lofty perch. Joe Biden is singularly responsible for that decline, and even in the face of a world-energy shortage that is sending economies into turmoil and could possibly cost millions of lives due to exposure and food shortages, the president is as aloof as ever.

Biden’s grand plan to fix everything to this point, as you pay $5 or a gallon of gas? To beg the Saudis and Emiratis to produce more oil halfway across the globe. But as Macron notes, they are already at or near capacity. You can only squeeze so much juice out of a lemon. Refining capacity is also another bottleneck that the president refuses to address. These are facts that any president who isn’t a senile old coot should be well aware of, yet it’s left up to the French president to enlighten him. Worse, it doesn’t even appear Biden was able to process what was said to him. Again, it’s just embarrassing to witness.

Further, just to put the finishing touches on this masterpiece of stupidity, Biden spent the last two years trashing the Saudis and snuggling up to Iran. That means that even if the Saudis had more production capacity (they don’t have enough to matter), they likely wouldn’t offer it to us anyway. That’s how idiotic the president’s foreign policy has been. For 50 years, this absolute mental midget has bungled every single major geopolitical question, and it’s no great shock he’d screw this up as well.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, places like North Dakota, Texas, and Alaska are sitting on mountains of oil reserves just waiting to be tapped. Instead of begging Islamofascist dictatorships for oil, we should be using our own domestic supply to own the world oil market. Biden doesn’t want to do that, though, because it would run up against his green agenda, and we can’t have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting upset, can we? That means you get to suffer while he hobnobs in Germany, doing nothing to actually help everyday Americans.

Canceled pipelines, frozen oil leases, and record energy prices. That’s Biden’s lasting legacy, and he can’t run from it. Hopefully, he pays a heavy price in November and in 2024.

Joe Biden's Gas Tax Holiday Is Another Foolish Attempt to Pass the Buck

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Joe Biden has officially announced his plan to ask Congress for a three-month gas tax holiday. Proponents see it as an opportunity to ease the burden high gas prices are putting on American families, particularly middle- and lower-class families.

The problem, as opponents are pointing out, is the negative impact such a holiday would actually have.

As my colleague Nick Arama pointed out earlier today, one of the biggest impacts a gas tax holiday will have is to increase demand while decreasing supply. And when demand goes up and supply goes down, prices also go up. The supposed 18 cents per gallon motorists would save? Negated by the increasing price of the dwindling supply.

Another issue Nick pointed out was how the energy industry has had to push back against Biden’s rhetoric already.

Meanwhile, Biden is blaming the oil companies for not producing more and threatening them with action. But the folly of all of this is that gas has been going up ever since Biden came into office — in part because he attacked the energy industry. Now he wants them to produce more after demonizing them and trying to do them in. But they can’t turn on a dime and come up with more.

The American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers sent a joint letter to Biden about a week ago explaining that their refineries are already operating close to their maximum capacity, but that nearly half of the capacity was taken off-line because of the facilities converting to renewable energy production. Not to mention all the government restrictions that are also hamstringing capacity. So the inability to refine more that Biden is decrying is directly due to the green energy policies that he has pushed.

Chevron CEO Michael Wirth also leveled Biden for the instability his approach has caused and said that has to stop if the problems are going to be solved, “[Y]our Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry. These actions are not beneficial to meeting the challenges we face and are not what the American people deserve.”

Biden’s rhetoric against the oil companies and energy sector is just the latest line of attack meant to pass the buck and put the blame for the current crisis on someone else. Before that, it was Vladimir Putin and his war with Ukraine. The evil oil companies are always a villain the left can rely on, after all.

Gas Prices Before Gas Tax Holiday
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

But the gas tax holiday is a new attempt to shift the blame, this time to Congress. What Biden is proposing is a policy that Congress has to approve, and it’s an attempt to make them responsible for high prices rather than him. This naked political ploy is Biden once again insulting the intelligence of the American people, who are increasingly becoming frustrated with his administration’s policies and antics.

In his speech, Biden continued to blame everyone under the sun while taking none of the blame for himself. Now, with the ball in Congress’s court, he will have someone else to blame… except that Democrats currently control both chambers of Congress and any failure to pass this gas tax holiday could potentially backfire and make them look even worse — at a time when they are facing an apocalyptic bloodbath in the impending midterms.

The Biden administration sees that a gas tax holiday polls well as an idea, so they’re going to go with it. But ideas always poll well. When the reality of the policy and the effects it has takes hold, it will backfire on the Biden administration and the Democrats. If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be obvious now: Governing by reacting and in response to polling doesn’t work.

His attempt to pass the buck to Congress will only serve to hurt the Democrats. He isn’t solving any actual problems with this speech. He’s just trying to get it off his plate ASAP.

Now that’s leadership.

Biden Is Threatening Oil Companies With Use of Emergency Powers Against Them

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Joe Biden has tried to blame everyone but himself for inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. His most common excuse for the rise in gas prices has been that it is “Putin’s price hike” because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the gas prices were going up long before Putin invaded in February 2022 — they’ve been going up ever since Joe Biden came into office. They’ve doubled since Biden took office and J.P. Morgan analysts are predicting gas may be $6.00 a gallon by August. It’s over $5.00 now and the experts are predicting that it will continue to be a problem.

It’s not hard to understand why, given Biden’s attack on the fossil fuel industry. When he ran, he promised that he would push the country to do away with fossil fuels.

But now, Biden is trying to place the blame on another source — the oil companies. He’s written a letter to multiple oil companies including Marathon Petroleum Corp, Valero Energy Corp, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, and Shell, blaming them in part for the high prices and taking profits.

Imagine you would ever have someone in Biden’s position daring to tell private companies that passing along their expenses is “not acceptable.” We’re talking about the government trying to dictate the means of production. On the upside, he finally seems to be accepting that lack of refinery output does impact prices.

I understand that many factors contributed to the business decisions to reduce refinery capacity, which occurred before I took office. But at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly on to American families are not acceptable. [….]

In addition, my Administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate Federal Government tools and emergency authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term and to ensure that every region of this country is appropriately supplied. Already, I have invoked emergency powers to execute the largest Strategic Petroleum Reserve release in history, expand access to E15 (gasoline with 15% ethanol), and authorize the use of the Defense Production Act to provide reliable inputs into energy production. I am prepared to use all tools at my disposal, as appropriate, to address barriers to providing Americans affordable, secure energy supply.

The crunch that families are facing deserves immediate action. Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis and respect the critical equities of energy workers and fence-line communities. I have directed the Secretary of Energy to convene an emergency meeting on this topic and engage the National Petroleum Council in the coming days. In advance of that, I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020 and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.

The lack of refining capacity — and resulting unprecedented refinery profit margins — are blunting the impact of the historic actions my Administration has taken to address Vladimir Putin’s Price Hike and are driving up costs for consumers. I appreciate your immediate attention to this issue and your efforts to mitigate the economic challenges that Vladimir Putin’s actions have created for American families.

Nevertheless, that’s a concerning threat. That’s a Mafia letter saying “Come across or we’re going to make you comply.”

Meanwhile, Biden is blaming them, when he is the cause of it. He’s the one who was shutting down pipelines, stopping drilling, and canceling leases. One of his allies, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), is even threatening a 21 percent surtax on oil profits. Why would business people want to increase production in such an uncertain environment where the government has declared them the enemy?

Biden talks about being in a “war” and the war affecting things. He’s right — except the war is the one he declared on the energy industry. He’s blaming the victims of his war. The purpose of this is to play to his leftist base who believe this lie that it’s because of gouging oil companies. They don’t ask why these oil companies weren’t gouging us all under Trump? But that’s what this letter is about — to say, “See? I threatened them with a strongly worded letter.”

But again, what would happen if they were to put a surtax in place? The companies would naturally raise prices as a result and make everything ten times worse. It would also reduce supply from companies because who would want to produce under the gun like that, with the threat of punishment from the government? That isn’t the way our constitutional republic is supposed to work.

The answer would be for Biden to retract his prior attacks and have a reasonable policy going forward so that companies and the American people could have stability in the market. But he just wants to act like a dictator and this letter is just the latest example.