Why is Biden begging dictators for more oil?

So, let’s get this straight: When the price of gasoline was going up this spring, President Biden blamed Vladimir Putin. Then, when prices went down this summer, Biden launched an all-out campaign to take credit. Now, gas prices are going up again, and the White House is — you guessed it — blaming Putin.

But before the war in Ukraine, Biden presided over the largest year-overyear gas price rise in at least 30 years. He needs to take responsibility for his role in driving up prices.

After channeling his inner Jimmy Carter and begging OPEC+ to increase oil production, Biden suffered a diplomatic humiliation this week when the oil cartel announced it was cutting production by 2 million barrels a day — a move that the White House called a “total disaster.”

Why was Biden rebuffed? Maybe because he promised that on taking office, he would make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” and stop arms shipment to Riyadh, only to abandon those promises and fist-bump the Saudi crown prince while groveling for increased production.

Worse still, the Wall Street Journal reports, Biden is preparing to lift sanctions on Venezuela’s narco-socialist dictatorship to allow Chevron to resume pumping oil there. So much for his promise to lead the forces of freedom in the “battle between democracy and autocracies.”

Why is Biden begging foreign dictators to increase production? The U.S. is sitting on 264 billion barrels of untapped oil — more than any other country on the planet. We should be unleashing our own domestic production, not asking Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to do so.

The White House said the OPEC+ decision is “a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels” by “increasing our reliance on … clean energy.”

In fact, Biden’s war on fossil fuels at home has done more to make us more dependent on foreign energy than any president in memory.

While President Donald Trump opened 100 million acres of public land and water to exploration, Biden has leased fewer acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II. He suspended all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by Trump.

Here’s the dirty secret: Prioritizing climate change means that Democrats actually like high gas prices. But they don’t like the political blowback.

So they are taking temporary steps to reduce gas prices — such as opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, issuing a waiver allowing summer sales of higher-ethanol gasoline, and begging foreign despots to produce more gas.

But as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted on Fox News this week, they are only taking steps that will provide “short-term relief.” In the long term, Buttigieg said, “we’re all going to be better off when American-made clean energy is dominating the way that we fuel our transportation system.”

If Biden cared about reducing gas prices in the long term, he would be doing everything in his power to increase domestic oil and gas production. He’s doing the opposite, because higher gas prices are part of their plan to force Americans to abandon fossil fuels.

His overarching goal, as he promised during the campaign, is to “end fossil fuel,” regardless of the cost to our economic prosperity and national security.