Although President Joe Biden made it a priority shortly after his inauguration to repeal his predecessor’s policies regarding domestic oil production, the Democratic Party has attempted to convince Americans that the country is actually more energy independent under Biden than it was during the Trump administration.
For her part, however, Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma detailed the collaborative and comprehensive steps the federal government is currently taking to divest from traditional forms of energy.
“It’s part of this whole government approach,” she said during a recent podcast interview. “Every agency is in on the act of either defunding the oil and natural gas industry.”
She specifically referenced the Bureau of Land Management, which is “saying you can’t really do your project here like you could in the past or we’re not going to lease like we did in the past because we’re just going to protect the land.”
While such an approach might seem appealing to activists who believe oil exploration is harmful to the environment, Sgamma argued that cutting domestic oil and gas production only gives other countries — including U.S. adversaries — an incentive to drill even more.
“If we can’t produce it in the United States, we have to import it from somewhere else,” she said. “So we get about 10% of our oil and natural gas from BLM lands, from onshore oil and gas production. That is federal. So that might not sound like a lot. But if you take away 10% of our production, it starts to add up.”
The Biden Administration has waged war on the American oil and gas industry, driving energy prices through the roof, and precipitated historic inflation—and then they try to claim victory. It’s a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/rMj6E7vcPN
— Senator Bill Hagerty (@SenatorHagerty) June 20, 2023
As U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) explained in a statement last year, American oil production releases significantly less emissions into the atmosphere than the processes used by many of the countries on which the U.S. currently relies for energy imports.
“All Americans should ask — why won’t Biden unleash America’s energy industry?” he asked at the time. “In his first days in office, the president killed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have employed thousands of Americans and provided a crude oil source from Canada instead of Putin’s Russian crude.”
Scalise went on to denounce Democrats who “love to talk about how they are committed to reducing carbon emissions but fail to admit that the United States emits much less carbon to produce oil and natural gas domestically compared with the other countries that President Biden is begging to produce energy because we have much higher standards than those adversarial countries.”
