Judge is right to rebuke Biden’s anti-oil obsession
Quin Hillyer
Thursday night the Biden administration lost yet another court battle in its ongoing jihad against domestic fossil-fuels production. Thank goodness. The legally and economically unwarranted jihad is bad for American jobs and living costs. It should end.
The administration was trying to put severe restrictions on a lease sale involving millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only had the lease sale already been approved before earlier Biden attempts to hobble it, but Congress, as part of the (misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, specifically directed that the planned sale be reinstated.
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Biden’s new restrictions were purported to be necessary to protect a rare species of whale, but federal judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana ruled on Thursday that the restrictions were legally unwarranted. Cain wrote that the administration looked like it was trying to “provide scientific justification to a political reassessment of offshore drilling” via what looked “more like a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative, reasoned approach prescribed by the applicable laws and regulations.”
The ruling was another well-merited rebuke to the administration’s lawless efforts to block or limit domestic energy production or delivery. For just two examples, Biden last August lost another Louisiana-based case in which Biden had tried to halt energy leases in 13 states. And in July of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia and Virgina to continue despite Biden’s attempts to stop it.
Even so, Biden’s hostility to domestic production has proved costly where he has succeeded in early rounds of court fights or administrative battles, such as when he stopped the Keystone Pipeline, and the damage will get worse still if he can succeed in defending his decision this month to bar drilling on millions of acres in Alaska. Overall, Biden used his first two years in office to slow federal oil and gas leases to the lowest level of any administration since World War II.
By April of this year, Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research had identified at least 151 ways Biden “has made it harder to produce oil and gas.” The deleterious results have been considerable and multi-faceted. The two most obvious ones have been massive job losses in the energy sector – as many as 59,000 forgone jobs from killing the Keystone Pipeline along, according to the Department of Energy itself – and big spikes in energy prices across the board, including gasoline per-gallon prices rising from $2.39 to an even $4.00 during Biden’s term.
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Even with Biden’s radically anti-oil ideology, one might think that these price hikes would convince him to pause his jihad by now if for no other reason than the damage they do to his re-election prospects in an electorate furious about inflation. One would think wrong: Radical ideology such as this doesn’t listen to reason.
To an extent, then the court decisions against Biden may be saving him from doing even worse political damage to himself, while at least at the margins limiting the damage he does to American pocketbooks. Either way, Judge Cain’s decision on Thursday in favor of the lease sale and against Biden’s restrictions is good news for consumers in the future. Even better news would come if Biden would act more reasonably. Alas, in this administration, there’s no sign of reason coming down the pipeline.
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