The Biden administration continues to enforce failing policies concerning oil and gas which are now beginning to affect the State of Nebraska. The Biden administration’s war against global warming and its war against the use of oil and gas are both misguided and wrong. So, today I would like to explain why this is the case and how it is affecting our state. President Biden likes to brag how oil production in the U.S. is the same today as it was under Trump. Well, that is not exactly true. At its height under Trump, the U.S. produced 13 million barrels of oil per day which is the same amount that was produced in July 2023, according to the latest U.S. data available. So, Biden is producing as much oil as Trump. However, according to a new study by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the Biden administration’s anti-energy policies of investing only with ESG companies, escalating business taxes, and new regulations on the oil and gas industry have resulted in an estimated loss of some 2 million barrels of oil per day compared to what it would have been under Trump.This loss in oil production results in an annual reduction in GDP of about $100 billion per year.
The situation gets worse. The anti-oil and gas drilling policies of the Biden administration are actually increasing pollution, not decreasing it. Under Trump, the U.S. had become energy independent. To the contrary, in 2022 under the Biden administration the U.S. imported 8.3 million barrels of oil per day from other countries. One million of those barrels came from the Persian Gulf. According to the Energy Information Administration, an oil tanker’s one-way trip from Saudi Arabia via the Suez Canal can take anywhere between 31-51 days and burn up to 2.5 million gallons of fuel. Burning that much dirty fuel is a major cause of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The situation gets even worse. Making matters exponentially worse is the fact that Houthi militants inYemen have now choked off the entrance to the Suez Canal. As a result, container ships and oil tankers are now being rerouted around the Horn of Africa and around the African continent through Cape Agulhas, making the trip to America significantly longer. Considering that a single container ship can emit four times more sulfer oxide than 50 million cars and in 2022 alone 214 cruise ships emitted four times more sulfur oxide than one billion cars, I believe we can safely conclude that the Biden administration’s anti-oil and gas policy has failed to achieve its desired goal of reducing pollution and greenhouse gases.
