The number of federal acres Biden leased for oil and gas is shocking.
About this time last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that, during his first 19 months in office, President Joe Biden leased fewer federal lands for oil and gas development than only one other president since the end of World War II. From President Nixon on, it recounted, no other president leased fewer than 4.4 million acres, with President Reagan holding the record of 48 million acres leased in 1981 and 1982. Those figures make Biden’s 126,228 federal acres leased all the more shocking.
Biden’s disastrous OCS oil and gas leasing plan could not come at a worse time. In late September, the Federal Reserve reported that, in August, inflation peaked at its highest in nine months, driven in large part by soaring gas prices. That was before Saudi Arabia and Russia announced they would reduce daily oil production by a million barrels. Many experts already expect that the price of oil could hit one hundred dollars a barrel in the near future.
The importance of the 1.7 billion acre federal OCS oil and gas program goes without saying, but, given the dearth of public knowledge on the subject, bears repeating. Today the OCS accounts for 18 percent of domestic oil production and four percent of domestic natural gas production. It provides billions of dollars annually for the U.S. Treasury, states, and, under the Land and Water Conservation Act of 1964, for outdoor recreation.
With a world war possible as at no time in living memory for most Americans and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at its lowest level since 1983, when it comes to domestic energy, the nation is headed in the wrong direction. It is however, the direction Biden promised to take us. Whether anyone can stop him from continuing down that danger and even deadly road before November 2024 is doubtful.