The price of a barrel of oil is approaching $120. In 2020 it was less than $50. This is very good for Russia. If that hadn’t happened, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have been able to afford the invasion of Ukraine. But why did it happen?
Recently it has come out that environmental activists worked with Putin to convince the European countries on the other end of Putin’s oil pipelines that Climate Change was such an emergency that they needed to drastically cut their oil production.
Not their oil CONSUMPTION, just their production. The demand was only slightly altered by the introduction of electric vehicles. They still needed almost as much oil as before, but now they had no choice but to import it, and Putin was happy to oblige them.
Social media darlings like Greta Thunberg shamed the adults in charge of policy in the EU into reducing their production out of concern for Climate Change, but all that really happened was transferring Euros to Russia.
The price is spiking at the moment because of the invasion of Ukraine. The US and other countries may stop importing oil from Russia as retaliation, which will likely drive the price higher. Did you know we import oil from Russia? Did you know Hawaii gets one third of its oil from Russia? AND 60% of Hawaii’s electrical power is produced in oil-fired plants? Blame the Jones Act, but that’s another subject.
The average price of gasoline has risen above $5.00 in California for the first time ever. My novel, Backlash, is about what happens to the nation’s economy when the price of gasoline rises to $6.00 per gallon.
America’s social media darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is a little older than Greta Thunberg, chronologically at least, has led the charge in promoting the end of fossil fuel production here through the Green New Deal. President Biden has fallen into line by, on his very first day, cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, even though Biden greenlighted Putin’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, and stopping drilling on Federal lands. Now Biden has cancelled existing Federal drilling contracts.
When President Trump left office, America was energy independent and a net exporter of energy. We were in a position to influence the world market price. OPEC was irrelevant; Putin was powerless. Just a few months later, Biden was begging OPEC to produce more, to bring world oil prices lower.
Democrats are in the untenable position of wanting gasoline prices to be higher so people will use less and adopt electric vehicles, BUT when they succeed in making the price higher, people blame Democrats, they lose elections. So they are trying to make gasoline scarce, but cheap; something that isn’t possible in any economy.
So here we are, with Putin destroying Ukraine because the EU and the US have given him billions of dollars in oil money in order to save the world from the threat of Climate Change.
Could President Biden do something to change the situation without getting into a shooting war with another nuclear power? It’s probably too late, and he would have to return to the energy policies of the Trump Administration, which means it will likely never happen. So if we DON’T go to war with Russia, we likely won’t do anything and Ukraine will be doomed.
Which has led to the most unlikely person in the world, Elon Musk, the leading producer of all-electric cars, to recommend on Twitter increasing oil production!
