On 6/16/2022, Senator James Lankford continues to call out the Biden Administration for its anti-US energy policies that he says are doing nothing substantive to fight high inflation. “I did have to laugh last week when the President made a speech and said he’s working on bringing down the cost of energy and so the announcement was, ‘I’m going to bring down the cost of energy by dropping tariffs on solar panels coming from the far east.’ Talk about out of touch. That’s out of touch. Not only because if we’re going to produce solar panels, why aren’t we incentivizing the production of solar panels here in America rather than encouraging the production of solar panels overseas in the far east? But how in the world is dropping tariffs on solar panels from the far east going to help folks filling up their tank with gas next week?
The President said he was going to solve energy issues on the price at the pump by increasing the amount of ethanol that we would use. Remember that one? That was about five months ago. That we’ll just have more ethanol and went to Iowa and made an announcement, ‘We’ll just do more ethanol,’ and the prices continued to be able to skyrocket and rise. The President then came on and said, ‘all right, I have, we still have a higher and higher and higher price.’ So, the ethanol whole thing didn’t work when he put that you out here, and so he came back and said ‘we’re going to do the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We’re going to release a million barrels a day from the strategic petroleum reserve.’ Remember that announcement? That announcement was made right about there, on this chart, is when that announcement was made.
How has it gone for gas prices since his announcement of we’re going to release a million barrels a day from the strategic petroleum reserve? It’s still going to be able to continue to rise. Because prices aren’t based on short-term input from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, it is based on long-term supply. That’s basic economics. Well now the talk has been a temporary gas tax holiday—a temporary gas tax holiday and that’s going to give people relief. Can I remind everyone we’re at over $5 a gallon? The temporary gas tax holiday would drop the price 18 cents. Eighteen cents is what it would drop the price. We’re not trying to get an 18-cent drop, we’re trying to get it back down to where it was over here or how about over here when we were at $2 a gallon, not 18 cents. Besides the fact, if you drop the gas tax holiday 18 cents, just for this year, it’s a $20 billion hole in our infrastructure, in our building for bridges, highways and roads, to get an 18-cent bump.
There’s also been the proposal that’s out there that he’s going to take over refineries. That was today. This, again, it seems like every week there’s a new thing that they throw out. Now it is a letter he sent to the major refineries and in the letter that the President sent to the major refineries, he wrote, ‘my Administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate federal government tools and emergency authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term to ensure that every region of this country is appropriately supplied.’ Great. So, the President is going to go into the refineries and he’s going to take them over, the same Administration that’s managing our formula is now going to manage our refineries. That’s going to work out terrific. Our refineries right now are running at 95% capacity. 95%.
The interesting thing about our refineries, America’s not built a new refinery since 1977. And just in the past three years, we’ve lost almost a million barrels a day of refining capacity in the United States from refineries shutting down. Maybe the better question the President could ask is, how do we start increasing our ability to refine, not how is he going to take over refineries and run it himself?
We have a major structural problem right now. This is just evidence of what’s going on across the whole economy. There are answers. There are solutions. But they’re not raising taxes and taking over refineries and putting oil out from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or running to Saudi Arabia. That’s not going to solve our energy problems. And I can assure us we’re not going to solve our 8.6 inflation rate until we solve the price of energy, because the price of energy is baked into every single product that we buy, everything. And if this doesn’t get solved, this doesn’t get better.
Mr. President, do what needs to be done to increase supply in America so that the price will go down. We all believe, we all believe in the decades ahead we’re going to have more electric vehicles, we’ll have more renewable energy. We all believe that. But 98 percent of the vehicles on the road right now run on oil and gas …
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Biden’s solution not working: drop tariffs, ethanol, Strategic Petroleum Reserve, gas tax holiday, take over refineries.