It’s Not His Fault!

At Politico Ben Lefebvre and Zack Colman argue that higher prices for oil and gasoline are not President Biden’s fault:

The biggest element of Biden’s climate agenda, the Build Back Better bill, has been left for dead in the Senate. Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked 6.2 percent last year, the climate research firm Rhodium Group noted, a surge that reflects how little the infrastructure underpinning the nation’s economy has moved away from carbon.

And even though the Biden administration has paused new oil and gas lease sales on federal land, the Interior Department processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden’s first year in office than three of the four years of the Trump administration. The U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas this year, and domestic oil production is forecast to reach about 12 million barrels a day, putting it close to where it was before the Covid-era collapse in fuel demand in 2020.

Still, Republicans are leaning on the European turmoil to swipe at Democrats’ green designs. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday cited the European conflict as a reason the state is leading a challenge to an Environmental Protection Agency proposal from December to strengthen vehicle emission standards, which would benefit electric cars and trucks.

“At a time when American gas prices are skyrocketing at the pump, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict shows again the absolute need for energy independence, Biden chooses to go to war against fossil fuels,” Paxton said in the press release announcing the lawsuit.

Here’s the graph they produce of U. S. oil production:

To my eye that looks as though production did, indeed, crash during the lockdowns of 2020 and is recovering slowly but has not returned to its 2019 levels. No?

Summarizing their argument:

1. We’re producing a lot of oil.
2. There’s a war on.

Leaving aside a “the buck stops here” argument or the reality that presidents get blamed for what happens on their watch whether their actions produced the situation or not, let me ask some basic questions. Why does Hawai’i, amazingly, import more gasoline and oil from Russia than any other state? Why does it use oil to generate electricity at all? Because

1. It doesn’t have domestic supplies of oil.
2. The Jones Act

If you’re not familiar with it the Jones Act regulates the prices that can be charged for shipping between U. S. ports. In practice it ensures that it’s cheaper to ship oil from Russia to Hawai’i than it is from Long Beach.

Why doesn’t Hawai’i use solar or wind? About 30% of Hawai’i’s electricity comes from solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal (mostly solar and wind). Why doesn’t Hawai’i use more geothermal? Because the people are on Oahu, the geothermal is on the Big Island, and Hawai’i’s sole geothermal plant is offline due to an eruption. Besides getting the power from where it is to where it’s needed is expensive and impractical. The state doesn’t actually have much choice. Using imported oil or LNG are just about its only options for baseline power. Relaxing the Jones Act might help.

Using more tidal power could probably be accomplished. That would, however, be unsightly and Hawai’i is highly dependent on tourism.

The state plans to be using 100% “renewables” to generate electricity by 2045. We’ll see.