Those '9,000 Unused Permits' Are on Biden

I don't condone vandalism, but those stickers that people keep placing on gas pumps are largely correct: Joe Biden owns a large share of the blame for high gas prices, and we don't even have to discuss his (or his predecessor's) inflationary policies to see that.

Representative Yvette Herrell (R-NM) outlines in some detail how the President's environmental policies hamstring oil producers -- specifically by making it impossible to companies to use the thousands of oil leases he's conveniently and wrongly turning around and blaming them for not using:

Image by Documerica, via Unsplash, license.

The 9,000 "unused" permits claim is misleading on multiple fronts. First, the Bureau of Land Management isn't approving thousands of the other permits necessary to put already-approved permits to use. Oil and gas operations are extremely complex and technical, with a single project often requiring multiple approved permits to start production. Federal law requires approval of permits on federal lands within 30 days of submission. Under the Biden administration, however, some permits have been languishing at the Interior Department for over a year.

The lack of new lease sales has made some approved permits useless as well. Given the patchwork nature of how land is leased and the need to drill horizontally to tap resources, land adjacent to existing leases is sometimes needed to make extraction worthwhile. To acquire this land, producers identify it for the BLM to include in the next lease sale, which usually happens every three months. Over a year into this administration, there has yet to be one lease sale on federal lands, making those permits that require additional land worthless.

Herrell writes this as she advocates passage of her immediate solution to this problem, which she calls the "American Energy Security and Transparency Act." It is worth noting that she mentions tort abuse by environmental groups and the fact that five lease sales "have been missed since ... Biden took office."

I haven't considered the merits of her proposal, but Herrell has done the truth a great service by helping the public see that it is indeed Joe Biden and his policies that are causing us pain at the pump -- and not the ridiculous left-wing stereotype of moustache-twisting oil tycoons somehow profiting by not selling more oil.

Although this is well outside what is politically possible today, it is worth noting that, were the government not so entangled in the economy, we would have reasonably-priced, plentiful gasoline now -- and Biden wouldn't be burning at the polls, at least for gas prices.

The ultimate solution to energy cost and supply problems is to separate economy and state. Our government should -- by protecting individual rights -- be creating the conditions (i.e., liberty) that make productive work possible -- not dictating what we can and cannot do every step of the way.

-- CAV