Gas

The Biden administration has found itself between a rock and a hard seam of coal. A cohort of Native American tribes have realized just how sacred — and lucrative — their lands really are, and they’re not trusting the promises of an old white man this time. “When the administration says, ‘We're going to create all these millions of jobs if we just switched over [to renewable energy] today,’ they haven't shown us the fine print that says where those jobs are coming, which region, doing what,” Daniel Cardenas, chairman of the National Tribal Energy Association and member of the Pit River Tribe, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "When you start questioning them there, then they start getting defensive.

With the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend upon us, the fast-rising cost of gasoline is getting a lot of attention. Last week, gasoline rose above $4 a gallon in all fifty states. That’s the first time that has happened. Some are predicting gas could reach $6 a gallon this summer. If that comes to pass, the average American family could see a major impact on their budgets. (It might be noted as well, that the price of home heating oil has nearly doubled this year. If that continues, the economic impact next winter, especially in the northeast, where a high percentage of homes are heated by oil, will be considerable.) The threat of a recession is rising thanks to fuel shortages. Why has the price of gasoline risen so far so fast?

Who is the most intriguing political artist of the Biden era? Cockburn is happy to welcome a new contender to the fray: Thomas Richard Glazewski of Manor Township, Pennsylvania. Glazewski is part of a daring street collective who have been posting stickers of Joe Biden on gas pumps. They show the president pointing with the caption “I did that!” and are placed next to the price of gasoline — which has risen significantly in the past year or so. The vinyl stickers — available on Amazon — are manufactured in China. Just like the Biden presidency, right? But Glazewski took his piece to a whole new level: risking his freedom last month, he turned his sticker protest into performance art by getting himself arrested. A viral video shows the artist’s arrest.

President Joe Biden has lashed out at fossil fuel companies, accusing them of using high gas prices to “pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” These are the same fossil fuel companies, by the way, that two years ago were charging a measly average of $1.84 a gallon. They’re also the same fossil fuel companies that in 2020 donated $1.6 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. But no matter. If nothing else, Biden’s inveighing against Big Oil takes me back to my more youthful days when progressives were less afraid to run hard against what they called “the polluters.” Back then, every oil derrick was a seething Deepwater Horizon just waiting to explode and blackface the local terns and herons.

The price of petroleum products is inherently cyclical, rising and falling over time due to natural and ineluctable economic forces. This has been going on since the dawn of the petroleum industry 163 years ago. The reason is that exploration for and development of petroleum resources are extremely capital intensive activities. Thus when prices are low, there is little incentive to increase production by taking the risks inherent in looking for and developing new supplies. But then, as the world economy expands over time, the demand for petroleum products increases, and prices rise. This increases the incentive to go look for more oil and gas, and the rig count goes up. New fields are located and new technologies (such as fracking) come on line.