Biden Administration Imposes Further Limits on Arctic Drilling

Chris Queen

(AP Photo/Judy Patrick, File)

The pain at the gas pump shows no signs of abating, and the Biden administration seems to want to make it worse. The White House announced on Monday that it’s reverting back to the Obama administration’s policy of opening only 52% of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve for oil and gas leases. Under the Trump administration, 82% of the land was open for drilling.

The National Petroleum Reserve is an area of about 23 million acres in Alaska, which the Harding administration set aside in 1923 as an oil reserve for the U.S. Navy. It’s now under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, who monitors the oil and gas leases for sale on the land.

“While the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had previously indicated that it had selected the Obama administration’s plan as its ‘preferred alternative’ for further consideration, on Monday it issued a Record of Decision formally affirming that it would return to the Obama-era plan,” reports The Hill.

In addition to the restrictions on where oil and gas companies can drill, the reversion to Obama-era policy sets aside specific areas of the reserve for environmental protection.

“In explaining its rationale, the administration said that it would better protect the environment while still allowing energy development,” The Hill notes.

In 2021, the administration suspended oil and gas leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve as well.

Related: Explainer: Why Are Gas Prices So High?

Meanwhile, gas prices are nearly $2 higher than they were when Biden took office.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average price per gallon for gasoline was $2.379 the week Biden entered the White House. As of this writing, the average price for a gallon of gas is $4.107, after a high of $4.315 per gallon the week of March 14.

(You could be seeing much higher or lower prices depending on where you live, but remember, these are averages.)

For all of Biden’s blaming the rise in prices on Vladimir Putin, gas has only gone up about 70 cents per gallon since Russia invaded Ukraine, where gas prices began a steady climb as soon as Biden took office.

The Hill misses the point of what allowing more oil and gas leases in Alaska would do for gas prices.

Referring to the administration’s reversion to Obama-era energy police, The Hill notes, “The move comes as the Biden administration is grappling with high gasoline prices and Republican criticism over its energy policies, but Monday’s move is not expected to have any immediate impacts on gasoline prices at the pump.”

“When a lease sale is held, it takes more than four years on average for companies to begin production,” the report continues. “The new decision represents an even earlier step in the process, designating what lands are eligible for lease.”

What seems to have been forgotten is that the mere announcement of more drilling for oil has a positive effect on prices. In July 2008, the Bush administration responded to high oil prices by announcing an expansion of drilling in Alaska. The effect was a noticeable drop in gas prices.

At the time, CNBC reported:

In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Now isn’t this interesting?

Democrats keep saying that it will take 10 years or longer to produce oil from the offshore areas. And they say that oil prices won’t decline for at least that long. And they, along with Obama and McCain, bash so-called oil speculators. And today we had a real-world example as to why they are wrong. All of them. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, McCain — all of them.

Using the same U.S. Energy Information Administration chart, the week President Bush made that announcement, the average price for a gallon of gas was $4.113. Prices dropped steadily throughout the rest of the year and reached a low of $1.613 per gallon the week after Christmas.

The Biden administration will do no such thing because they’re committed to the far-left agenda of climate alarmism. So expect gas prices to stay this high until we get another Republican in the White House.

Until then, the administration hopes you’ll just settle for an expensive electric vehicle.

“I’ve been a writer as long as I’ve known what writing is,” says Chris Queen.

A lifelong Georgia resident and an alumnus of the University Of Georgia, Chris is an Editor and Columnist at PJ Media, where he has written for over 10 years. He has also written for The Resurgent, NewsReal Blog, and Celebrations Magazine, as well as his personal website, chrisqueen.live.

Chris is a fan of anything involving his beloved Georgia Bulldogs and is a Disney aficionado. He is the author of the book Neon Crosses. For media inquiries, please contact communications@pjmedia.com.

Kakistocracy: noun, government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power

Kakistocracy: noun, government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.

The old saying goes that even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.  So you might think that during a 50-year political career, the odds would dictate that Joe Biden would, once in a blue moon, make a correct decision — just based on the odds.  But you’d be mistaken.  Biden has stumbled and bumbled from one disastrous decision to the next.  Disastrous, that is, for America.  Biden himself has prospered handsomely in spite of his glaring incompetence and corruption. 

Biden’s long Senate career was based on being the credit card companies’ man in Washington.  While crowing endlessly about the working class being “his people,” Biden sponsored bills allowing bank issuers to charge egregious interest rates and to make it harder for working men to escape the credit trap through bankruptcy.

When Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, he turned the confirmation of Clarence Thomas into a political smear campaign that descended into a degenerate three-ring circus. In his first campaign for president, he failed to garner a single percentage point before having to withdraw when confronted with his past lies and blatant plagiarism. He literally stole a speech detailing a British politician’s life story. He ran again in 2008 but again failed to reach even one percent of the vote.

When Barack Obama took him off the primary trash heap to make him vice president, Biden first made a hash out of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasting hundreds of billions on boondoggles and giveaways to Democrat cronies. Little of the recovery billions was spent on anything useful to America. Biden went on to manage our relations with China and Ukraine, pocketing untold millions for himself and his family by selling out America’s security interests.

By the time he ran for president again in 2020 he was a spent husk of his former corrupt and incompetent self, delivering asinine performances in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. When the Democrat establishment propped him up to once again stop Bernie Sanders, Biden was set up for the strangest presidential campaign in modern history. While Donald Trump barnstormed the nation with packed, enthusiastic rallies, Biden cowered in his basement, occasionally venturing out to speak with a few dozen voters sitting in circles drawn on the floor.

For his vice presidential pick, he chose — if you can believe it — an even more buffoonish candidate than himself.

Had it not been for Mark Zuckerberg buying and staffing government election offices in swing states, and the media and Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden family’s corruption, Biden would now be enjoying his dotage in Delaware, creeping on unsuspecting children with yarns of Corn Pop and South African arrests.

Instead, the man with one of the most astonishing records of abject failure in Washington was installed in the White House, and he has remained true to form.  As one of a hundred senators and then as vice president, there was a limit to how much damage he could do.  But as president, the shackles have been removed.

His first agenda item was to throttle our oil and gas sector, offshoring tens of thousands of good paying jobs to Russia and the Middle East — along with our energy independence. He threw open our southern border and encouraged virtually unlimited illegal immigration — during a global pandemic.

He sponsored trillions of dollars in wasteful spending, pushing our national debt to over $31 trillion.  Were it not for two Democrat senators who had not yet taken leave of their senses, it would have been even worse.  As it is, Biden has sparked the largest one-year increase in inflation in 40 years.

Biden’s “defund the police” rhetoric delivered us soaring violent crime in Democrat-run cities, while he sicced federal law enforcement on parents who object too strenuously to their children being indoctrinated with anti-White racism and LGBTQIA+ ideology. 

It can truly be said that as president, Biden’s record of failure remains unblemished.  

But now comes what may be the capstone on Biden’s long history of buffoonery and corruption.  In Ukraine, we have an armed conflict that threatens to plunge the world into an economic depression and raises the specter of nuclear war.  Not only did Biden set the stage for this calamity when, as vice president, he was in charge of Ukraine policy and led Kiev to believe that NATO membership was in Ukraine’s future, but on the eve of the Russian invasion, he refused to admit that it was not.  Then Biden all but admitted to Vladimir Putin — on live TV, no less — that NATO would not defend Ukraine if Russia chose to invade. 

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, Biden and his administration have crafted sanctions that seem almost designed to boomerang on America’s and Europe’s fragile post-pandemic economies, while forcing Russia into a deeper alliance with China. 

With the U.S. over $31 trillion in debt, Biden seems totally oblivious to the perilous position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the consequences should that privileged position end. 

Economists predict that food and gasoline will cost the average U.S. household an additional $3,000 this year, and inflation threatens to push millions of lower-middle income-earners into abject poverty.

And bumbling, corrupt Joe Biden isn’t yet halfway through his first — and please God, last — term.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Jim Daws is a recovering talk radio host at jimdaws.com.

The Consumer Price Index Rose 4.2% In April Compared To The Same Month Last Year.

The consumer price index rose 4.2% in April compared to the same month last year, officials reported yesterday, the largest year-over-year increase in prices since 2008. The index measures the price of everyday items like groceries, clothes, and activities, and is closely linked to inflation—an effect where consumers are able to buy less with every dollar they spend.

Analysts pointed to a number of drivers for the price rise: a flood of consumer spending, pandemic-induced supply chain issues, and prices returning to normal after a year of weakened demand. Beyond short-term price normalization as the economy recovers, many have expressed concern that the more than $5T in economic stimulus passed over the last year and federal interest rates near zero (see overview) will lead to an overheated economy.

The news follows a weak April jobs report that undershot expectations by more than 730,000.