The Biden administration’s energy regulations may cost the U.S. economy $100 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) each year, according to a new report published by the Committee To Unleash Prosperity.
The administration has unleashed a bevy of regulations from several agencies that have distorted energy markets and disincentivized long-term investment in fossil fuel production, which in turn has increased the costs of energy production and consumption to the detriment of the overall American economy, according to the report. These policies and their ramifications play to the advantage of major oil producers in Asia and the Middle East, some of which are known to use oil revenues to bankroll terrorist organizations, while American consumers and businesses navigate higher costs.
“This study examines what has happened with oil and gas production when we adjust for the large increase in the world price since Biden entered office, and the upward supply trends that had widely been expected to continue,” the report’s executive summary states. “Coincident with Biden’s new anti-energy policies, vigorous ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ (ESG) investing and rising business tax rates, U.S. oil production has fallen 1-5 million daily barrels short of previous trends. Increased costs of oil and gas extraction are reducing annual GDP by about $100 billion.” (RELATED: Biden Revoked Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda. Now It’s Coming Back To Haunt Him)
When asked how he would bring down the cost of goods such as gas, Trump says, “Drill baby, drill!” pic.twitter.com/cVjqzjeaAJ
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 11, 2023
Further, the administration’s approach to regulating energy markets has chilled incentives for technological innovation in extracting fuels, and the natural gas industry has also underperformed relative to how it was trending when former president Donald Trump was in office, according to the report.
Notably, oil production in the U.S. is hovering at or above record levels, even as the industry deals with the regulatory barrage. While the Biden administration has suggested that this fact demonstrates that it is not cracking down on fossil fuel production, Daniel Turner, an energy sector expert and the executive director for Power The Future, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this narrative is misleading because “the lifetime of an oil well is years in the making, and so all of the production that is online now is from wells that started well before Biden came into office.”
The Committee To Unleash Prosperity’s report also rejects the notion that “Biden’s anti-fossil fuels policies – ranging from taking hundreds of thousands of acres off-line for drilling, to canceling pipelines, to restrictive environmental regulations that make drilling more expensive – are not the reason for the energy crisis and high gas prices at the pump.”
The administration has taken dozens of executive and regulatory actions designed to make oil and gas activity more difficult and expensive since it assumed power in 2021, according to research conducted by the Institute for Energy Research.
The Biden administration has engaged in a broad effort to reduce new oil and gas activity on federally controlled lands, which has resulted in millions of acres being removed from consideration for oil drilling activity. Biden pledged to fully stop oil and gas activity on federal lands as a candidate and issued a moratorium on oil and gas leasing on federal lands in 2021, later saying in August that he would have been able to fulfill that promise if not for the court system.
The administration finalized the most restrictive offshore oil and gas leasing schedule in American history on Friday, has leased the fewest acres for oil and gas drilling of any administration in the last 80 years and has moved to increase the costs of oil and gas activities on public lands that it has not excluded from such uses altogether. The administration has also retroactively nixed leases in Alaska and attempted to remove huge swaths of the state’s land from eligibility for oil and gas activity, but the administration’s approach has not satisfied hardline environmentalists, a key electoral and fundraising constituency for Biden.
The Biden administration’s energy policies are not only holding back the American economy, but also empowering foreign countries to whom the U.S. has ceded control of the marginal price of oil, according to the report.
“Anti-energy policies in the United States enrich the major oil producers in Asia and the Middle East, some of whom use their wealth to fund terrorism. Indeed, they are enriched twice by our policies,” the report states. “One benefit they get is that subtractions from U.S. production are subtractions from world production that contribute to higher world oil prices. The second benefit is that undermining shale activity in the U.S. gives OPEC more pricing power, because we are no longer as able to respond to OPEC production cuts with production increases of our own.”
The White House did not respond immediately to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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