Daniel Baldwin, OAN White House Correspondent
UPDATED 3:15 PM PT – Thursday, September 15, 2022
A new report from the Department of the Interior shows the Biden Administration has leased fewer acres of land for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters since former President Harry Truman in the 1940s.
The Department of the Interior has given out leases for 126,228 acres through August 20, 2022, according to analysis from the Wall Street Journal. The last president to lease out less than 4.4 million acres at this point in the first term of his presidency was Richard Nixon in 1969-1970.
“Joe Biden has been, I won’t say a closet radical, but simply a radical throughout his entire career in public service,” Larry Behrans, communications director for Power the Future, told One America News. “And so the fact that he had the reins of the federal government and is punishing American energy independence like he has is something that really should surprise no one.”
This comes as President Joe Biden held an “inflation reduction” party at the White House South Lawn Tuesday, driven by the signing of his Inflation Reduction Act. Yet, Biden failed to mention that inflation hit a worse than expected 8.3% earlier that same day. Specifically, energy services increased 19.8% year-over-year and utility (piped) gas service jumped 33%. Behrans says Biden refusing to lease acres for drilling is sending Americans a terrible message in light of these numbers.
“The green ideology and the cult of the environmental movement is more important than American family budgets,” Behrans said. “It’s really that simple.”
Behrans says the Biden Administration could not care less that the average American family is struggling to make ends meet.
“They know the pain that this is causing at the American family kitchen table,” Behrans said. “We all try to figure out how to make ends meet and they don’t care and to make matters worse, they actually celebrate. They say things are getting better. The disconnect has never been so wide. It’s a grand canyon chasm of disconnect between what Joe Biden is saying and the reality that American families are facing. And it is all energy.”
Biden has repeatedly pledged to the American people that he would wean the U.S. off of fossil fuels and transition to more climate-friendly solution.
“No more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling including offshore—no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill—period,” Biden said on the campaign trail.
Behrans says this refusal to lease out acres for drilling has directly contributed to skyrocketing prices.
“[Inflation is] hotter than expected because Joe Biden has undermined American energy independence,” Behrans explained. “Yes, oil is a huge component of what goes into the price of the pump, but we’re all heated by natural gas. And that is also extracted on American lands. And when Joe Biden has cut off American energy production on public lands to the degree he has, then, you know, just third grade economics is gonna tell you that the price is gonna go through the roof.”
Behrans says Europe is an indicator of where the U.S. could be headed if Biden’s green agenda pushes forward. Europe has been experimenting with new methods of conserving energy as winter approaches, with some cities in Germany turning off heating and switching to cold showers.
“The next step is going to be what we’re seeing in Europe, where it goes from massively expensive energy to energy scarcity,” said Behrans. “And so there needs to be an absolute U-turn on this insane energy policy. That is the cause of record gas prices. And once in a generation inflation, it literally comes down to that one thing. And the cause is Joe Biden.”