(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Despite skyrocketing gas prices in the United States amidst unrest in Eastern Europe, President Joe Biden has paused “new leases and permits for federal oil and gas drilling,” according to CNN.
A compliant media has rushed to blame Russia for the pre-existing spike in inflation and even the supply-chain crisis, with CBS tweeting that the “economy has been hit with increased gas prices, inflation, and supply-chain issues due to the Ukraine crisis.”
But Biden is doing himself no favors in public opinion polls by attempting to use spurious climate change metrics to limit America’s energy independence.
After a Trump-appointed federal judge denied the government the ability to use the so-called “social cost of carbon” to refuse to permit new drilling, the administration responded by indefinitely freezing all new federal oil and gas drilling.
“The Interior Department has assessed program components that incorporate the interim guidance on social cost of carbon analysis from the Interagency Working Group, and delays are expected in permitting and leasing for the oil and gas programs,” Interior Department spokesperson Melissa Schwartz said in a statement.
“Instead of following the judge’s ruling and lowering its estimate, the president simply turned everything off at the tap,” the editorial board of the New York Post wrote. “It couldn’t have come at a worse moment.”
In public remarks given on several occasions, Biden has warned that Americans must tighten their belts in order to “defend democracy” in Ukraine.
“Defending freedom will have costs for us as well, here at home,” Biden told the nation Tuesday. “We need to be honest about that.”
The defense of “freedom” in a foreign country most Americans have never heard of serves as a rational for managed decline at home https://t.co/xDRVOSsbWW
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) February 22, 2022
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, has also taken a break from windsurfing to remind everyone that he exists and that “the climate” is the real loser of a European war.
