The voters rejected him, his designated successor, and his radical left-wing agenda.
So now Joe Biden is trying to extend his rule by other means, particularly if means blowing the place up on his way out.
He's come up with this, according to JustTheNews:
President Joe Biden may take one more shot at the oil and gas industry before he departs the White House.
According to Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, the president plans to issue a decree that would permanently ban new offshore oil and gas development within U.S. coastal waters.
“Joe Biden is again attacking American energy like he’s done for the last four years, but today’s action will do nothing but further enshrine failure as the biggest part of his legacy. President Trump should overturn this order on the first day and quickly usher Biden’s green agenda into the dustbin of history,” Daniel Turner, executive director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy group, said in a statement.
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to overturn many of Biden’s anti-fossil fuel actions, but he might not be able to reverse a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas development. The 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gave presidents the authority to permanently protect U.S. waters from leasing, but it contains no specific provision to undo the protections.
That's funny. Two years ago, he told the American public he wouldn't dream of shutting down American oil production, and to the contrary, was all in for energy self-sufficiency, claiming in a speech from the White House in 2022:
... we need to responsibly increase American oil production without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. Let me — let’s debunk some myths here. My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production; quite the opposite. We’re producing 12 million barrels of oil per day. And by the end of this year, we will be producing 1 million barrels a day, more than the day in which I took office. In fact, we’re on track for record oil production in 2023.
And today, the United States is the largest producer of oil and petroleum products in the world. We export more than we import. And I still heard from oil comp- — and I’ve heard from oil companies that they’re worried that investing in additional oil production today will — will — in case of the — in case demand goes down in the future, and they’re not going to be able to sell their oil products at a competitive price later.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming pointed out this past April that he was lying:
He knows he deserves zero credit for production records. For three years, he has attacked affordable, available and reliable American energy.
The credit belongs to the innovators, entrepreneurs and roughnecks in places such as my home state of Wyoming. These individuals work hard and take enormous risks every day. Their vision and labor made the U.S. energy independent in 2019 — for the first time in 70 years.
Instead of celebrating their achievement, candidate Joe Biden threatened to throw them out of work. He “guaranteed” his administration would “end fossil fuel.” In his first days in office, he killed the Keystone Pipeline and cancelled federal lease sales and then existing leases. He has launched an unprecedented regulatory assault on the fuels that provide four-fifths of the nation’s energy.
While oil output is at a record high, we could be producing even more but for the president’s “whole of government” effort to chill investment. The year before President Biden was inaugurated, the Energy Information Administration was forecasting oil output in 2023 of 14 million barrels a day. Actual output came in at 1.1 million barrels per day below that forecast.
He also was gaslighting. Barrasso noted just why these Biden claims were so phony:
Oil production hit a record in 2023 because more and more of our oil and natural gas production is occurring on private and state lands, where developers don’t need permission from Washington to drill. In 2005, about 68 percent of our oil and 62 percent of our gas came from private and state lands.Today it’s risen to roughly 75 percent and 90 percent, respectively. It’s also no accident that most of this production takes place in Republican-led states, including Wyoming.
When it comes to production on federal lands, however, we’re living on borrowed time. We’ve been able to maintain output thanks to production from wells drilled on leases issued before Biden became president. While the administration has issued drilling permits to existing leaseholders — as required by law — that hasn’t stopped it from slow walking these permits.
That was noted several months ago, back when there was an election to win.
Now that Biden is on the way out, he's changed his tune, determined to extend his rule to well beyond his time in office.
He's taking advantage of a badly written law to destroy America's energy largesse, keeping it in the ground forever, no matter what our economy needs. He's nominally doing it in the name of a green energy transition, which as Power Line has noted, couldn't be fulfilled even if everyone in America wanted it, owing to the absence of necessary resources. Even Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, America's top electric car company, has stated that fossil fuels are critical to the global economy and should not be "demonized."
In reality, Biden's doing it to please his greenie donors, who contributed much to Democrat campaign efforts -- shutting down offshore drilling will be just the thing to boost their profits with oil production on the outs.
Worse still, he's doing it to Get Trump, unable to accept that he has lost the election and been repudiated by voters, and determined to backseat-drive the Trump presidency to a failure as resounding as his own. While he can (phonily) claim credit for increased oil production on his watch, he wants to make sure that Trump can't get the energy America needs as he shuts the door to energy production on the way out.
It's outrageous, and lawmakers had better get to work modifying that law. No sleazy bitter president, heading out of office, should have a right to determine the voters' energy future by executive order, just to Get Trump.
At a minimum, revoking what Biden decrees will put the Trump administration in courts with leftist lawsuits for possibly the duration of the presidency, and with a corrupted judicial system, could lead to any outcome.
Americans deserve better than that. Biden and his successor were thrown from power for this reason. The American people have the right to determine their leaders and their energy future, not the miserable smoking ruins of Biden's failed presidency.
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