How Do We Stop California from Throwing Its Weight Around?

California is the American Left's biggest asset and its biggest liability. It is a liability because it clearly demonstrates to the world what unfettered "progressive" governance looks like: out-of-control crime, through-the-roof taxation, an inhumane regulatory regime, insane gas prices, the constant threat of blackouts, and a government so divorced from reality that it is unable to actually accomplish anything.

If you need proof on the last point, check out the New York Times' recent deep-dive into the state's "multi-billion-dollar nightmare" of a high-speed rail system, which has seen its cost projections rise from $33 billion to $113 billion, is currently costing $1.8 million a day, and which will almost certainly never be completed. And for all the Left's bellyaching about "income inequality," the Golden State is the poster child for that concept. As Victor Davis Hanson once wrote,

By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union. Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Another fifth is categorized as near the poverty level — facts not true during the latter 20th century. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients now live in California. The state has the highest homeless population in the nation (135,000). About 22 percent of the nation’s total homeless population reside in the state — whose economy is the largest in the U.S., fueling the greatest numbers of American billionaires and high-income zip codes.

Unsurprisingly, Californians of all political persuasions have been fleeing in droves, which has led to the state's losing a congressional seat (and therefore a vote in the electoral college) in the wake of the 2020 census. But even with that population shift, California is still the largest state in the union, the 400-poound gorilla of the U.S.A., which is why it remains an asset. It has the ability to throw a lot of weight around.

Sacramento's acting out again.

Case in point: this past August, the California Air Resources Board approved Governor Gavin Newsom's directive banning the sale of carbon-emitting (that is, gasoline- and diesel-driven) vehicles in the Golden State by the year 2035. This will have major repercussions for the automobile industry nationwide. Manufacturers, unwilling to be locked out of the California market and its 39 million perspective customers, will shift their development priorities towards EVs. So if this rule remains in effect, it will be increasingly difficult to purchase a non-E.V. as 2035 draws near.

There's another reason that California's environmental regulations is putting pressure on auto-manufacturers: in 2009 the state was granted a waiver by the Obama administration regarding the Clean Air Act which allows it to set harsher emissions limits than the national standard, an authority the Trump administration attempted to revoke and the Biden White House reestablished. Seventeen states have tied their emissions standards to California's, with New York State recently taking the plunge. New York governor Kathy Hochul said that, in light of government subsidies for charging stations and vehicles themselves, “you will have no more excuses” not to buy an E.V. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board correctly translates this sentiment: "You will have no more choice."

One state, at least, is trying to abstract itself from this scheme. Virginia signed onto Sacramento's emissions standards in 2021, under former governor Ralph Northam. That same year saw the election of Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, whose tenure in office has seen him declare war on the destructive policies of his predecessor. He has signed executive orders banning Critical Race Theory, rescinding the state's school mask mandate, and beginning the process of withdrawing Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (another plot to remove environmental regulation from the realm of democratic oversight). And now he's turned his attention towards bringing emissions standards back home to Richmond.

Youngkin's 2022 state energy plan, released earlier this month, called on state legislators to reverse the alignment with California, and Republicans in the GOP-controlled House of Delegates of delegates are answering the call. Any repeal, however, will have to make it through the state senate, where the Democrats are in the majority.

Still, we wish Governor Youngkin well in his efforts, along with the attorneys general of the seventeen Republican-led states which are currently suing the Environmental Protection Agency in the hopes of getting the Golden State's Clean Air Act waiver revoked. After all, if Leftists are successful in turning the whole country into California, there will be nowhere left to flee to.

OPEC Slashes Production: Dems, Your Wallet Hardest Hit

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC+, has agreed to a major cut in oil production. According to CNN, the supercartel -- which includes the 13 member nations of OPEC as well as a loose grouping of ten or eleven other oil producing states like Russia, Mexico, and Kazakhstan -- will slash production by "2 million barrels per day, the biggest cut since the start of the pandemic," a reduction "equivalent to about 2 percent of global oil demand."

Always concerned about the fate of their beloved Democrats, the CNN report makes it a point to mention that this "threatens to push gasoline prices higher just weeks before U.S. midterm elections." No kidding. Of course, for our captured commentariat, the disruption this might cause to their political narrative is a bigger deal than the disruption to people's lives. Gas prices have come down since their summer peak, but they are still outrageously high compared to just a couple of years ago. Americans are already struggling to fuel their cars and handle the soaring price of groceries and other necessities that have been inflated by soaring gas prices.

Still, they're not wrong. Despite some frankly terrible candidate selections on the GOP side, widespread dissatisfaction with Democratic policies have made several midterm races closer than they have any right to be. Oil and gasoline prices trending upwards again, especially just as heating season is getting underway, is likely to tip the balance further to the right.

No wonder Politico reports that Democrats are "seething" at the vote, and are frustrated that the Biden administration's attempts to influence OPEC decision making -- including a presidential visit to Saudi Arabia in July -- were all for naught. While visiting Riyadh, Biden's charm-offensive infamously included a fist-bump for the cameras with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to kick-off their meeting. Maybe he would have gotten better results if Biden hadn't pledged during his presidential campaign to make the Kingdom a "pariah" state. Wanna bet the Crown Prince took exception to those remarks?

Hoping to get out ahead of GOP point-scoring, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), put out a statement saying, “I hope that Republicans will join me in supporting [economic retaliation] rather than wishing high gas prices on the American people so they win an election."

Nice try, but the Democrats are responsible for this mess, and they're going to have to live with the consequences. If they weren't so focused on killing Keystone XL (the original sin of this administration's energy and economic policies); on banning oil and gas leases (and then half-heartedly reintroducing them); on pushing ESG on their big bank cronies at every turn; on backing the closure of U.S. oil refineries, or their conversion into BioFuel processing plants; all while appointing devout Green New Dealers to the cabinet; and generally waging war on the resource sector, we wouldn't be in anything like the mess we're in.

Not to worry though -- the White House is looking to make it all better by releasing 10 million more barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (because that worked so well the last time) while easing sanctions on Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro's oil-rich authoritarian regime. Maybe Glenn Reynolds was right when he said the real issue here is

[Our] domestic oil industry enriches people — and states — Democrats don’t like." Money going to Saudis, Russians or Venezuelans is one thing, but money going to Texans, Oklahomans or South Dakotans is another. Truth is, red states and their inhabitants rank higher on the administration’s enemies list than do shady foreign nations.

One year ago, right here at The Pipeline, this author wrote that, under this administration, "OPEC is back in the driver's seat." Sometimes, you hate to be right.

In Britain, the Time Bell Rings

Observing the United Kingdom sailing headlong into a sea of troubles over energy and inflation, a cynic might well say: “Lucky Boris Johnson—he was forced out of power at exactly the right moment. Someone else will now have to carry the can.” It’s true that Britain’s economic troubles, which were already growing, have metastasized dramatically in the last few months, two in particular—a general rise in all-round inflation to 10 percent and a still sharper rise in regulated gas and electricity prices from $2,331 now to $4,237 in October and $5,026 in January.

Together they add up to a massive “cost of living crisis.” And because they grow out of deeply-rooted problems and self-destructive policies in the U.K.’s long-term economic strategy, it will take time and tough remedies to eradicate them.

As always, however, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of people lining up to carry the can. About a dozen senior Tories put forward their names to succeed Boris at the start of the Tory leadership election. They were whittled down to two of Boris’s ministers—former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and current Foreign Secretary Liz Truss—who are fighting a battle of debates on economic policy across the country in front of Tory voters and activists. We’ll know the result by September 5, with Truss now the favorite.

Truss: ready to lead?

[My own snapshot take: she’s the better bet on supply-side and de-regulation policies to improve productivity and revive British industry; he’s the safer pair of hands on financial and budgetary policies to restore a stable financial framework that would help the economy to expand without overheating. But both should be more prepared to cut state spending and borrowing.]

Whoever wins the premiership then, however, will have to face a general election within about 28 months. Given the severity of Britain’s problems, the Tories will undoubtedly face an uphill battle. That means Sir Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition, must now be taken seriously as a potential prime minister.

And indeed Sir Keir, a progressive left-wing lawyer before entering politics, whose usual pained expression is that of a man who has just swallowed a live fish out of politeness at a diplomatic dinner, and who has been struggling to make an impact on the electorate, has been given a shot in the arm and buoyancy in his step by the crisis.

Labour is demanding the recall of Parliament to debate the “cost of living crisis.” That’s quite a shrewd demand since Johnson is now a “caretaker” Prime Minister who constitutionally has to leave all major decisions to September the 5th and his successor. Starmer's attack on the Tories as a “do nothing” government in the face of the cost of living crisis then carries more weight. By contrast, he was able to step up to the plate with his own remedies in a speech that was better received than any earlier efforts and proposed solutions that according to opinion polls are in tune with the popular mood.

Those solutions—an energy price “freeze” paid for by the $34 billion proceeds of a higher windfall tax on oil and gas producers— are not new. They have been kicking around the Labour party’s thinking on energy since two leaders ago. And when Rishi Sunak himself was chancellor only a few months back, he introduced a much milder $6 billion version of the same thing which he delicately called a “temporary, targeted energy profits levy” of 25 percent. (It came accompanied by a 90 percent tax relief for firms that invest in oil and gas extraction in the U.K.)

Starmer: I can see No. 10 from here.

The problem with such “concessions” to opposition attacks and the popular mood is that they concede the principle without satisfying the demand. Worse, they make Labour’s proposals look like common sense to which the Tories are offering only a miserly response.

Commonsense is a rare and valuable commodity in public life, but economics is one of the very few areas where it can’t be applied wholesale. Commonsense suggests that we should charge lower fares for railway journeys at rush hours when the trains are crowded and uncomfortable. Economists respond that we should charge higher fares then and lower fares at off-peak times to encourage people to travel in less crowded and more comfortable conditions at all times. If we ignore them, commonsense ensures that we end up strap-hanging for hours in cattle cars.

In the same way the economically sensible response to higher energy prices is to devote state assistance to cash subsidies to the consumer—with larger subsidies going to poorer people for whom energy is a bigger proportion of their total spending. People then get to decide whether to devote this increase in their income to energy, to food, or to their other household needs. They know those needs better than “the Man in Whitehall.”

Given this full responsibility over how to spend their total income, they would be free to change their behavior by, for instance, using less power than usual. Moreover, high electricity prices, for instance, would give them further encouragement to do so, thus reducing demand for electricity, oil, and making a gradual start to solving the energy crisis in general.

O, lucky man!

So much for the demand side. On the supply side, as long as prices remain high—and any decline would likely be gradual—energy companies would have the incentive of high profits to search for new oil and gas fields and to re-open old ones closed in response to regulation. (We already see that happening.) Even as demand was being moderated by high prices, supplies of energy would be encouraged and increased by them. The energy market would come into balance, and other things being equal, prices would fall.

Which is why a windfall-profits tax is both mistaken economically and unjust ethically. A bold claim, I hear you say. But as it happens, with help from an old friend and colleague, Philip Lawler, I wrote a classic article on the Case against a Windfall Profits Tax thirty-three years ago. Originally I “ghosted it” for the U.S. Treasury Secretary, William Simon, who a few years later gave me permission to publish it under my own name which I have now done in National Review and the Spectator Online.

Immediately on entering office in 1981, Ronald Reagan blew away a  ramshackle maze of overlapping agencies and bureaucratic bafflegab; de-controlled energy prices and production; and led the world into a sustained three-decade boom floating on a sea of cheap oil and gas. It looks as if the Brits have decided to go in the opposite direction—and if Labour wins in 2024, with their foot on the accelerator.

Fools and Their Money

From CNN:

America just got a $100-a-month raise

Next time you stop at a gas station, think of it as a $100-a-month tax cut. Or a maybe $100-a-month raise. The steady drop in gas prices over the last few months has turned into an unexpected form of economic stimulus.... Since hitting a record of $5.02 a gallon on June 14, the national average price for regular gas is down $1.10, or 22 percent, to $3.92, according to AAA.... Since the typical US household uses about 90 gallons of gas a month, the $1.10 drop in prices equals a savings of $98.82.

Got that? The decline in gas prices over the past six weeks means that you, average American, have effectively gotten a hundred dollar raise! Hurray!

How'm I supposed to afford this? I voted Democrat.

Except, well, we can't help but notice that this article ignores the 108 percent increase which led up to that record $5.02 national average, beginning when Joe Biden took office. As Ed Morrisey points out, even with the drop, prices are still sitting 65 percent above what they were on inauguration day. And even that doesn't factor in the lessening value of each dollar, the result of Bidenflation. Moreover, says Morrisey,

[T]he price didn’t drop because the Biden administration brought massive new supplies into the market. The prices dropped due to a fall in demand for gasoline as it got too expensive for American consumers to use on vacations and other non-essential travel. That indicates an economic contraction on the way, not a pay raise.

Which is to say, far from being a sign that the recession is cancelled, this dip in gas prices is more like the spotter shouting, "Iceberg, dead ahead!"

Some raise.

THE COLUMN: America's 'Transitioning'—but to What?

In case you haven't heard, the United States is currently in the process of "transitioning." For reasons of decorum, and to not upset the rubes, from what to what is never quite spelled out, but those of us who have been following the "progressive" Left for the past six decades or so have a pretty clear idea of what they mean. It was first brazenly articulated by candidate Barack Obama in a campaign appearance just before the 2008 presidential election when he said, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

At the time, such braggadocio was largely chalked up to typical hustings rhetoric by a fresh new face eager to contrast his relative youth (Obama was 47 at the time) with the geriatric-adjacent ambulatory husk of John McCain, who was 72, You know, something akin to John F. Kennedy's line in his 1961 inaugural address about "a new generation of Americans, born in this century." JFK was born in 1917; Dwight Eisenhower, the man he was succeeding, had been born in 1890. Even though both had served during World War II (Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Kennedy as a Navy lieutenant in the Pacific), they seemed of vastly different generations. In other words, just talk:

Except, as we now know, it wasn't. Obama meant every one of those thirteen infamous words, and older folks who had lived through the 1960s knew exactly what he meant. "Change" was not simply a buzzword meant to distinguish the "new" policies of one party from the "old" policies of the other, within a context of broadly accepted governing principles and love for the nation as founded, including the primacy of the Constitution. Rather, it was a complete break from the American tradition, a kind of cultural-political coup whose message couldn't have been clearer.

The Trump interregnum interrupted the steady flow of "progress" away from the "charter of negative liberties" (Obama's phrase) that is our founding document and toward FDR's notion of the "Four Freedoms," first floated in an address to Congress on January 6, 1941, nearly a year before Pearl Harbor. Two of Roosevelt's four "freedoms" were freedom of speech and freedom of worship (redundant, since they were already enshrined in the First Amendment); the other two were freedom from want—"economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the world"—and freedom from fear—"a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in the world."

This was a speech aimed not at America but at the world as Roosevelt, heading into his unprecedented third term (it was, after all, an "emergency"), tried to drum up support for imperial Britain in its fight with its National Socialist German cousins, in the teeth of strong isolationist sentiment at home. But the ideas gained traction domestically over the succeeding decades, morphing into such left-wing notions as a universal basic income and unilateral disarmament. A transition was needed away from the self-reliance of the citizenry and the framework of a limited federal government, and so the two final amendments to the Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth, were hastily consigned to the oubliettes of history, aka, the dustbin.

Both those amendments were intended to confine the central government to its enumerated powers, but generations of clever and malicious lawyers have all but destroyed such quaint notions as individual and states' rights. The latter was collateral damage of the Civil War and both were obliterated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as author Christopher Caldwell convincingly argues in his book, The Age of Entitlement: America since the Sixties. 

Though Americans are reluctant to admit it, the legacy of the 1960s that most divides the country has its roots in the civil rights legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was enacted in a rush of grief, anger and overconfidence — the same overconfidence that had driven Kennedy to propose landing a man on the moon and would drive Lyndon Johnson to wage war on Vietnam. Shored up and extended by various court rulings and executive orders, the legislation became the core of the most effective campaign of social transformation in American history.

Because it's wreckable, all right?

Thus began the "transition" in earnest. With Obamacare and the takeover of student loan programs, not to mention the corrosive effects of the auto industry "bailout," Obama went a long way in his two terms toward establishing the kind of centralized socialism his mentors and handlers desired; the country was lucky that his innate slothfulness prevented even more such "fundamental transformation."

The came Donald Trump's surprise victory over the Left's designated heiress, Hillary Clinton, which temporarily derailed their plans. Their furious counter-reaction began the day after Trump was elected; by Inauguration Day 2017 the media was already calling for his impeachment, and by the end of his first full month in office, the Left had claimed the scalp of National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, and it was all downhill from there. Henceforth, the administration was staffed by a cabal of its enemies, which spied on him, leaked to the media, disrupted the orderly working of the White House, supported his political foes, and began greasing the skids for his defeat—by any means necessary—well before the midterms. Alas, he was too ineffective a leader to do anything meaningful about it; after all, this is the man who hired Christopher Wray at the FBI and failed to fire him on his way out the door.

One thing the institutional Left couldn't dent while Trump was in power was the booming American economy, but from the moment bona fide geriatric semi-ambulatory husk Joe Biden supplanted him thanks to a "fortified" election in which both halves of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party enthusiastically participated in order to get rid of him, the economy has hit the skids with malice aforethought. The social battles have largely been won by the Left, which is why you have drag-queen story hours at your local public library and "gender reassignment" disfiguring surgery for girls and castration for boys fervently advocated by Democrat government officials and their pet media. Shoplifting is legal in many places, and talk about freedom: you can poop on the sidewalks with impunity. 

Now it's the economy stupid, and its turn to transition. Just ask the Big Guy, who on his first day behind the Resolute desk unleashed a war on the energy sector, nominally in the name of "climate change" but in reality because, in the words of Gordon Gekko. "it's wreckable, all right?"

An "incredible transition," and don't you dare call it a "recession." Next we have Janet Yellen, head yenta-in-charge at the Treasury Department and former chairx of the Federal Reserve, to explain the transitioning of your pocketbook from full to empty:

And don't forget economic adviser Gene Sperling, an Obama retread and currently the White House coordinator for something called the American Rescue Plan, who's also got some transition 'splainin' to do:

Quoth this parrot: "This is an economic transition moment." He's right: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead as we complete the "transition" from a store-of-value-based currency (the dollar, until Nixon wrecked it in 1971) to the wet dream of the Modern Monetary Theory brigands, for whom it's impossible to print too much funny money because, hey, we can always print more! 

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic framework that says monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada, which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending. Put simply, such governments do not rely on taxes or borrowing for spending since they can print as much as they need and are the monopoly issuers of the currency. Since their budgets aren’t like a regular household’s, their policies should not be shaped by fears of a rising national debt.

Don't try this at home, kids. But now that the adults are back, what the hell? If girls can be boys and boys can be girls, it's a mixed-up, muddled-up shook up world anyway. There is no innate nature to anything any more, and nothing really matters. As the Left's favorite economist, John Maynard Keynes, famously said: "In the long run, we are all dead," so let's party like it's 476 or 1543 or 1914.  It's the ultimate triumph of mind over matter, of fiat over gold, of fantasy over reality, and you're a bigot if you think otherwise. You're the enemy now. So like the blushing bride on her wedding night, lie back, think of England, and let the transitioning begin. After all, you have no choice. You're next.

Biden's Billionaire Donors Having Buyers' Remorse

Joe Biden isn't good at very much, but when it comes to blame shifting, he's the world champion. Over the past several months he's argued repeatedly that the primary culprits for out-of-control oil and gas prices are first, Vladimir Putin and, second, nefarious oil executives. Neither claim was convincing, but his latest assertion is the baldest faced falsehood of all. Over Fourth of July weekend, when many Americans were hitting the road and holding cookouts (and, consequently, having to deal with the inflated cost of gas and food), the president did his best to transfer culpability to local gas stations:

This tweet is absurd. Biden's reference to "the companies running gas stations" notwithstanding, gas stations are generally owned and operated by individuals. They're Mom-and-Pop businesses, and they don't make much of a profit at all on gasoline. In fact, the gas pumps are essentially a way to draw drivers in to the real money maker, the convenience store. These are the people Biden is addressing with this thinly veiled "do it now" threat.

It is so nuts, in fact, that even liberals felt obliged to respond. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos -- a Biden supporter it should be noted -- was one of them:

This, by the way, isn't the first time that Bezos has felt obligated to call out the president on Twitter. Back in May, Bezos mocked the idea that raising the corporate tax rate (which was cut during the Trump Administration) would solve the inflation problem.

And he further pointed out that Biden and his allies in Congress helped create these problems and then tried to make them worse:

Now, Bezos is a devoted Leftist, and there is very little chance that he supports anyone other than the Democratic nominee in the next presidential contest. But his frustration with Biden's incompetence in these tweets is palpable. And, what's more, they likely reflect an increasingly common position among America's plutocrats. Elon Musk, for instance, has already semi-endorsed Ron DeSantis.

You get what you pay for of course, but it seems as if some of Biden's billionaire backers are beginning to think he's a bum investment.

Nationalize 'Big Oil'? Are You Crazy?

Since the Biden regime is busy reviving every bad idea from the late 1970s such as stagflation, the energy crisis, price controls, and weak foreign policy, it was inevitable that one of the worst ideas from that era is also trying to make a comeback: nationalizing “big oil.”

Back in the 1970s the proposal to nationalize the oil industry found support from some otherwise sober-minded figures such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, while today the idea is being flogged mostly by predictably radical figures such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and deep green climate alarmists, such as William S. Becker. But with President Joe Biden, surrounded in the White House by true believers in the climate mania, menacing the oil industry with demagogic charges of “profiteering,” it is not hard to see the idea gaining traction with the progressive left desperate to avoid electoral disaster in November.

And help us freeze to death.

Back in the 1970s, the premise behind nationalizing “big oil” was that the federal government could manage oil production better than private industry in the interest of consumers by stopping “profiteering” and smoothing out production epicycles. The proposal never got very far for the simple reason that most Americans didn’t think the same people who run the Post Office monopoly would be competent at running the oil industry. The record of foreign nations that have government-owned and run oil industries is pathetic. Consider for example the 75 percent decline of Venezuela’s oil production since Hugo Chavez expropriated private and foreign oil companies. The steady decline in production of Mexico’s ample oil reserves under Pemex finally prompted Mexico to open its oil industry to foreign private companies.

It is an unappreciated fact that over 90 percent of the world’s oil reserves are government-owned, rather than privately owned, and this contributes to instability in the long-wave oil price cycles. It is not the oil majors that manipulate oil for political reasons; it is governments. The world and the oil market would be better off if it privatized oil resources.

The argument today is quite different. Writing in The Hill, Becker deserves credit for being explicit: his purpose is nationalizing oil companies is to put them out of business: nationalizing the oil industry “would allow the government to manage the industry’s drawdown, a process the private sector is ignoring... The federal government typically nationalizes companies to save them. In this case, it must nationalize Big Oil to save us all from a future we don’t want.” Translation: the oil industry isn’t committing suicide fast enough to suit the environmental fundamentalists.

Windfall profits? What windfall profits?

To be sure, the major oil companies invited some of this with their ill-considered pledges to be “carbon-neutral” by 2050, no doubt thinking that the latest climate policy euphemism for “we don’t really mean it”—“net-zero emissions”—leaves plenty of wiggle room for creative emissions accounting. Rather than thinking they could appease the climate campaign with these virtue signals, they’d be better off straightforwardly defending their industry in the manner of Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services. Wright argues: “If you look at the bigger picture, our industry causes a dime of damage to the world and a dollar of benefit. The benefits versus the costs are enormously larger.” Or the oil industry could simply cite all of the official international government forecasts that conclude that the planet will still depend substantially on oil, natural gas, and coal in 2050.

The plight of Europe since the outbreak of the Ukraine War shows the folly of suppressing our own oil and gas sector and making ourselves wholly dependent again on foreign suppliers to fill the gap when “green” energy inevitably falls short of its extravagant (and extravagantly expensive) promises. Europe is already looking for face-saving ways to back away from its sanctions against Russian oil and gas while cranking up coal power, the most hated energy source. Germany faces a non-trivial possibility of running out of natural gas next winter. Meanwhile President Biden is groveling cap-in-hand before the oil sheiks of the Middle East, who may be no more inclined than Putin to help out the person who the day before, in the case of Saudi Arabia, labeled them human rights monsters. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how much worse off the U.S. would be if we forcibly shut down our own oil companies.

"Fracking Damages Our Beer." OK, then!

To the contrary of claims that the oil industry is reaping “obscene” profits, we should entertain the proposition that the industry needs much bigger profits. It is tedious, but necessary for the slow learners on the left, to repeat some elementary facts about the oil industry. Its profit margin is close to the average for all manufacturing companies (and less than half the profit margin for tech companies like Apple), and often sees its profit margin collapse in the regular epicycles of global oil prices. Given that the Biden Administration and woke Wall Street have been constricting the oil industry’s access to capital, the industry is more reliant than ever on generating internal capital—not only for continued exploration and production, but for the investment necessary to develop new technologies that actually mitigates emissions, such as carbon sequestration or carbon air capture.

The oil majors, especially ExxonMobil and Chevron, did push back politely against Biden’s oil demagoguery. Chevron was the most candid: “Unfortunately, what we have seen since January 2021 are policies that send a message that the Administration aims to impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs.” If they really want to make progressive heads explode, they should follow up with the argument that they need larger profits.

Biden Mistakes Demand For Supply

Gas prices continue to average around $5.00 per gallon nationally, which is a major factor in our ongoing issues with inflation. Democrats, with the upcoming midterm elections in mind, are freaked out. And all the more because President Biden's approval rating, according to two new polls, is down to 32 percent. Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds predicts that that number will continue to drop, commenting "He has only begun to fail."

How, you ask, could a Democratic president, in our hyper partisan age, with the media always in his corner, fall much further than 32 percent? By refusing to address this problem in any meaningful sense. That's exactly what we're seeing -- the president's response to rising oil prices thus far has been to blame "greedy" oil executives (we're meant to believe that they were overwhelmed by greed only after Biden took office, and not during the plutocratic Trump administration) and Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine (never mind that prices had been rising steadily for months before Russian hostilities began), while maintaining the same anti-oil and gas policies he's held to since the day he entered the White House.

No one is buying it, of course, so Team Biden has moved onto gimmicks which they hope will distract the voters. Earlier this week, the president called for a temporary suspension of federal gasoline and diesel taxes. Such a move would shave somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 20 cents per gallon off of your local fill-up price.

Now, we'd all like to pay less for gas, but this isn't going to work. We've even seen the same play fail not long ago. As Saagar Enjeti recently explained,

On June 1st, New York suspended its motor fuel tax of eight cents a gallon, as well as its four cent sales tax on up to two dollars a gallon. The average price of gas that day was $4.93 cents. Two weeks after what is, in effect, a .16 cents per gallon tax holiday went into effect in the State of New York, the price of gas was $5.04 per gallon!

Fundamentally, the problem we're facing now is one of supply, and that is being choked off both by our limited refinery capacity (which is itself a product of environmentalist policies that make it nearly impossible to build new refineries) and Biden's anti-resource-sector positioning. By goosing demand -- people will drive somewhat more if gas prices are somewhat lower -- Biden's proposal arguably exacerbates the problem.

And no federal taxes!

As things stand, the opposite is happening. The Wall Street Journal reports that the demand for gas this spring and summer is down between 5 and 8 percent from the pre-pandemic average, a significant drop. "Drivers have begun consolidating trips or filling up their tanks with only as much fuel as they need to get by for a few days. Some are carpooling or taking mass transit, while others are working from the office for fewer days each week, analysts said."

This might not be such a bad thing -- the WSJ quotes OPIS head Tom Kloza as saying, “You have to have some demand destruction to give supply a chance to catch up.” It is, essentially, a case of the market adjusting to demand outstripping supply. But the less driving there is, the fewer goods and, especially, services are consumed. An economic slow-down will be the consequence of this, and very likely, a recession.

Pray that our house of cards doesn't tumble from the shock, and that our leaders -- Biden included -- correct course before things go too far. But don't count on it.

THE COLUMN: Dead on Arrival

At the opening of the 1950 classic film noir, D.O.A., Edmund O'Brien strides purposefully into a big-city police station, proceeds down long, endless corridors, and finally arrives at a door marked Homicide Division. "I want to report a murder," he says to the head detective. "Who was murdered?" asks the cop. "I was," replies O'Brien.

In this, year two of the dreadful administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., we Americans know just how he feels. From the moment this blustering blowhard of a United States senator of no accomplishment from a meaningless state took office in January 2021, he has been busily poisoning the country for the simple reason that he can, he wants to, and there is no one to stop him.

The beneficiary of the hinkiest election in modern American history thanks to the illegal changes in balloting occasioned by the unnecessary Covid panic, and given the narrowest possible margins of control in both the House and the Senate, the superannuated chief executive has done everything in his power to show his contempt for the American people, to damage our patrimony, and make our lives increasingly miserable. 

And yet, like O'Brien, we're not quite dead yet, and still staggering around trying to catch our murderer before time runs out. Barring the hand of God, the first opportunity we'll have to put Biden out to pasture won't come until November 2024, and while the congressional elections this fall could possibly remove both houses of Congress from the geriatric clutches of the bibulous Nancy Pelosi and the baleful Chuck Schumer, that can only stanch but not stop the country's internal hemorrhaging. Like the hapless Frank Bigelow, desperately searching in his last hours for the psycho killer who poisoned him before the "luminous toxin" kills him, we're unsure whom to trust, with both friends and foes suspects alike. 

"This can't be happening," we think, but it is. Under the cloak of Covid "emergency"—the punitive lockdowns, the destruction of our education system, the loss of social contact, the delusion that our fellow humans were carriers of a deadly disease who needed to be shunned or even imprisoned—Americans' constitutional freedoms were summarily abrogated without a shot being fired, and we were consigned to effective house arrest (and worse in places like Australia and Canada). Our freedom of movement—essential to life in a country as large as the United States of America—was drastically curtailed and our transportation system deliberately wrecked. Meanwhile the "climate change" canard continued apace, and the push for electric vehicles was intensified, even as the nation's electric grid was tangibly collapsing.

Since Robinette took office, gas prices have more than doubled, part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been emptied, our hard-won energy independence achieved during the Trump era has been frittered away, and we've been reduced to begging erstwhile enemies like the "kingdom" of Saudi Arabia to do the jobs Americans just can't be allowed to do. If this looks like a conspiracy to you, don't worry: it is. And one that the conspirators have been quite open about for decades. They're a suicide cult, hell-bent on killing us as well as themselves:

Analysis has now shown that the carbon embedded in existing fossil fuel production, if allowed to run its course, would take us beyond the globally agreed goals of limiting warming to well below 2˚C and pursuing efforts to limit to 1.5˚C. The global carbon budgets associated with either temperature limit will be exhausted with current fossil fuel projects, and in fact some currently-operating fossil fuel projects will need to be retired early in order to have appropriately high chances of staying below even the 2˚C limit, let alone 1.5˚C.

Therefore, we, as over 400 civil society organizations from more than 60 countries, representing tens of millions around the world, call on world leaders to put an immediate halt to new fossil fuel development and pursue a just transition to renewable energy with a managed decline of the fossil fuel industry.

The first step in this effort is a simple one: Stop digging. No additional fossil fuel development, no exploration for new fossil fuels, no expansion of fossil fuel projects. We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Just about every word in this screed is either a false premise or an outright lie. The notion of keeping global temperature increases to under 2℃ is purely arbitrary, while the idea of carbon being a pollutant is anti-humanism at its most pernicious, since we are carbon-based life forms who breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide—the very stuff of life for the green trees and fields the Left constantly celebrates, the concept of symbiosis being apparently beyond them. The unsightly forests of Brobdingnagian windmills currently uglifying landscapes around the world testify to the success of their monomania. 

Their blatantly dishonest attempts to link "climate" with weather, however, have had their intended effects on public opinion, pushed largely by propagandistic media outlets such as NPR and the New York Times, which has a whole "hub" devoted to the subject as well as a regular section on "climate and environment." It's important to note here that the Times's reach extends far beyond its direct readership, since its news judgment sets the table for every other media outlet in the country, while your tax dollars subsidize NPR's increasingly deracinated fixations on "climate change," race, and trannies. And naturally you know who's on board with the whole thing:

So those high prices for gasoline and the long, chaotic lines and canceled flights at the airports are not a bug, they're the lynchpin of the whole scheme, which is itself part and parcel of the entire Great Reset project (about which much more tomorrow; watch this space). In order for the Lords of Davos to control you they must first curtail and control your freedom of movement, and what better way to do that than to make the price of oil prohibitively expensive? First your cars stop moving, then the trucks that deliver almost everything of value, including food, to the stores. An inability to move freely and without government oversight will vanish as computers take over your automobiles and which, when they are fully electric, can be disabled at will. As they like to say: You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy. 
 
What better metaphor, then, for the parlous state of our national affairs than the sight of Biden on his keister after toppling off his bike over the weekend. This frail, thoroughly nasty man with some very peculiar tendencies and an immediate family that might best be described as Caligulan in its behavior, not only embarrassed himself but the country he pretends to lead. "I'm good," he said after his tumble, which may be his biggest and most brazen lie of them all.
 
In the the meantime, we keep rushing around in the dark, trying to figure out why this happening and who is doing it to us. We know the answer, but feel there's nothing we can do about it. Like Bigelow, we'd like to see the man in charge, but nobody is, not really. We can breathe and we can move, but we're not alive because we took that poison, and nothing can save us. We know who the psycho killer is, half our fellow countrymen voted for him, and the murder is taking place in full view from sea to shining sea.
 
Unless a miracle happens, we're D.O.A. and our final destination is dead ahead. 

Weaponizing the Government Against the People

To assert that Washington D.C. is a political place is as obvious as asserting Twitter opposes free speech. It’s empirical. However, in the case of a bill the House recently passed, there is no doubt that legislators have reached a desperately new level of political gamesmanship. Whether rooted in blind ignorance, willful oblivion, or good old fashion partisan jackassery is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that there are specific tactics being integrated into many pieces of legislation introduced by House Democrats. Since taking office the Biden administration is keen to stitch investigatory powers into the authority of many agencies, even in defiance of political or constitutional reality.

Known as The Consumer Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022,this bill passed largely and unsurprisingly along party lines, with the exception of four Democrats who joined their Republican colleagues and voted against it. The bill gives the president the power to issue an emergency declaration that would make it unlawful to hike gasoline and home energy prices, “...in an excessive or exploitative manner." It would also give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more tools to crack down on (punish) alleged price gouging, allowing the FTC to prioritize enforcement action on big oil and gas companies.

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There are, however, a couple notable problems with this legislation and the corresponding vote on the House floor. Responding to price gouging doesn’t work if the people allegedly gouging don’t actually control the price of the products for which gouging is being alleged.

The oil and gas industry is divided into well-delineated sub-sectors. They include "upstream," focused on drilling and extracting oil and gas from out of the ground; "midstream," which broadly constitutes processing, storing, transporting and marketing the oil and gas extracted by the upstream companies; and "downstream," which represents the refining, distribution and retail sale of petroleum products.

Setting aside the lack of a definition in the bill of what  "excessive or exploitative” might mean in the context of free markets, the more disconcerting element is that the legislation was specifically written to impugn the upstream oil and gas sector instead of to actually bring relief to consumers. These legislators know the upstream sector doesn’t control the prices consumers pay at the pump or for home heating oil. That wasn’t the point of introducing the legislation. Intentionally misleading their constituents while doing nothing to mitigate the market conditions was the point.

Beware of the regulatory monkey.

After having called for hearings last month about the causes of increasing fuel prices, the Democrat sponsors of the bill and those who voted for it, desire to conflate the activities of the oil and gas industry with the Biden administration’s failed energy policies and objectives, which these legislators support. It is a feckless effort that wastes time and resources, and diminishes the confidence of the electorate in their elected representatives. Their constituents, after all, are experiencing real economic hardship because of high consumer prices for fuel. Engaging in political stunts that achieve no tangible end is disrespectful and lazy.

Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, (D-TX) is one of the four Democrats who voted against the bill. "The Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act would not fix high gasoline prices at the pump, and has the potential to exacerbate the supply shortage our country is facing, leading to even worse outcomes," Fletcher said in a statement. "For these reasons, I voted no on this legislation today."

While the legislation passed 217-207 in the House, it is ultimately expected to fail in the Senate where it would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster the Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) will undoubtedly use to defeat it. More insidious than eye-rolling, however, is not the outcome of this round of legislation but rather, the integration of a tactic that has become increasingly common under the Biden administration and should be concerning to voters of both parties.

Whether dealing with gasoline and home heating prices, the integration of the environmental, social, governance (ESG) construct into the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), or the formation of a new division for ‘environmental and social justice’ at the Department of Justice (DOJ), this administration unceasingly tries to codify investigative authority by various agencies into their legislation. They seek this power so they can punish political adversaries whom this administration views as enemies. When the idea fails to persuade, the administration immediately turns to heavy-handed investigatory overreach.

Big Congress is watching you.

Perhaps its historically abysmal approval ratings are an indication of how few people agree with the Biden administration’s approach. Regardless, the willful misrepresentation of issues, followed by a barrage of administratively created investigatory powers feels more "Stasi-esque'" than demonstrative of serious political acumen. The ultimate objective of the administration, it seems, is to politicize every challenge and use it to take greater control of every aspect of American life. This "gouging" bill is merely another example. The relief that a genuine policy change would bring is ignored and in its place are disingenuous attempts to gain control of the direction of the country through intimidation.

With the mid-term cycle now under way, the miscalculation this cynical tactic represents could prove more damaging to the extreme progressive wing of the Democrat party than even Republicans anticipate. Independents and even moderate Democrats are realizing that they are being treated like Monopoly pieces on the playing board of politicians committed to the entrenchment of their own power. Where post mid-term legislation can’t role back the investigatory tactic, judicial challenges will assuredly be employed. The American people, of broad political underpinning, are growing weary of the disrespect of the disingenuous in D.C.