Jennifer Jacobs
@JenniferJJacobs
Scoop: Biden admin is weighing a plan to release roughly A MILLION BARRELS OF OIL A DAY from U.S. reserves, for several months, to combat rising gasoline prices and supply shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sources tell @AlbertoNardelli @SalehaMohsin and me.
8:15 PM · Mar 30, 2022

For context, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Releasing one million barrels a day would translate to a savings of about 18 cents a gallon off the national average if it translated directly to the price of gas. It won’t, though. Much of the oil held by the government is no longer useable domestically because of environmental regulations. Instead, any oil released would be dumped into countries like China and India. That could possibly make a small dent in the global price of oil, but when you consider that the world produces 76 million barrels of oil a day, that one million barrels suddenly becomes even more irrelevant.

In other words, Biden’s ploy is completely useless. It’s also dangerous in that the strategic reserves exist to supply years of oil to the United States in the event of some kind of isolating event. They also exist for military use if oil can’t be otherwise garnered while fighting a war. Again, we are talking preparation for apocalyptic-type events, not gas prices being too high because of the left’s self-defeating green agenda.

Further, the Defense Production Act is not at all designed to operate as a communism cheat code for presidents who are too stubborn to change their damaging energy policies. If it’s not profitable now for American companies to go gangbusters producing “green energy,” it won’t be just because Biden makes them. Such a move would also spur more inflation as the supply of the products those companies originally produced will be reduced in order to make things Americans don’t currently want to buy. //

So let’s drain our strategic oil reserves and go full USSR on American companies. What could possibly go wrong?