Good for the gander

Well isn't this interesting? Not quite a year ago, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Tiessen absurdly credited Donald Trump with making the United States an "energy superpower," and just as absurdly disparaged Joe Biden for squandering the energy supremacy he'd inherited. This came at a time when a confluence of factors involving the pandemic and, later, Russia's invasion of Ukraine had driven oil production down and prices up. I explained all this in considerable detail here, and very succinctly (in a 1-minute read) here.

How things have changed. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that U.S. oil production will reach a record high in 2023, and that in 2024 production will be even higher. U.S. natural gas production also set all-time records last year. By Tiessen's moronic standard, it follows that Joe Biden should be proclaimed energy king. All hail the king.

And make no mistake: Tiessen really is a moron. His explanation for how Trump made the U.S. an energy behemoth is imbecilic both as a matter of fact and of reason. Tiessen's risible case is constructed of nonsense such as Trump's withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, which was just an aspirational demand-side framework involving emissions targets and reporting requirements that had no relevant bearing on U.S. energy production. Or like Trump's approving the Keystone XL pipeline extension, on which construction had barely gotten going (there were still well over a thousand miles yet to be built) when Biden canceled it two years ago, and which plausibly wouldn't yet be carrying any oil had it gone forward.

Or Trump's opening lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which had no effect at all on U.S. oil production, and never will. In that instance hardly any leases were sold, and no company capable of actually producing in the Arctic participated in the auction. It would take at least a decade for any oil to flow even if serious development ever commenced. None has. Energy companies well understand that development in the Arctic is a losing proposition, for multiple compelling reasons, and they want nothing to do with it.

Or Trump's canceling Obama's Clean Power Plan, which had never actually been implemented; which involved electricity generation, not oil production; and which (because it aimed to reduce coal in the energy mix) would have actually increased natural gas production had it gone forward. Or maybe not: Energy markets have been deprecating coal in any event.

These absurdities make up the bulk of Tiessen's case for Trump's energy magnificence, and a U.S. preeminence allegedly squandered by Biden. They landed in early 2022 in the pages of the Post, on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, at a time when energy markets were floundering from pandemic-related imbalances that began in mid-2020 when first demand and then supply collapsed. Demand soon recovered but supply didn't, driving prices upward, as I explained here. If that weren't bad enough, Russia's invasion pushed energy markets into immense turmoil, with prices rising further, as an extraordinary global reordering between suppliers and consumers commenced.

You can't but shake your head in wonderment at how such drivel as Tiessen's can find its way to the pages of one of the country's great newspapers, even in the opinion section, but there it is. Unfortunately, millions of Americans who have no command of any of the relevant facts beyond what they pay at the pump, and who in any case don't know how to think, find such nonsense persuasive. Thus are alternative realities cultivated and coddled.

U.S energy dominance has actually developed as a steady progression (substantially thanks to fracking) over a couple of decades, with Trump getting in at the end and having essentially nothing to do with any of it, as Tiessen's silly litany of Trump's energy "accomplishments" amply demonstrates. I can't resist pointing out that this is all reminiscent of Trump getting in toward the end of a historically long economic expansion and claiming credit for having produced an economic "miracle," even though he consistently lagged Obama in job creation, and his annual GDP growth ranged from anemic to okay. (His best GDP year was no better than Obama's best.) Trump actually lost a couple of million jobs on net over his four years in office. Stupid China Virus. His creation of around 6.7 million jobs prior to the great pandemic collapse was just a continuation of what had long been happening under Obama, but at a consistently lower rate under Trump. For his part, Biden has created around 11 million jobs in just two years, and the current unemployment rate of 3.5 percent, a fifty year low, matches the lowest rate under Trump.

(Update Feb 3, 2023: Biden created an astonishing 517,000 jobs in January, far more than analysts had expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.4 percent, the lowest level since 1969. Biden has created 12.1 million jobs in 24 months in office, a rate that's unprecedented in U.S. history. As Trump himself would put it, "like nobody's ever seen.")

(Update Apr 7, 2023: Biden's job creation machine rolls on. 326,000 jobs were created in March, and 236,000 in April, despite the Fed's ongoing attempts to bring down inflation by cooling the economy by raising interest rates. The Fed may now believe it needs to create a recession.)

But I digress. Sure, Trump has always been a fraud and a huckster, and his marks are as numerous as the stars, but let's move on. Now we have Biden poised to preside over record high oil and gas production, with dimwits like Marc Tiessen obliged by their own facile standard to acknowledge that Biden is the energy king.

Notice that I said "preside over," not cause. U.S. presidents don't control energy markets any more than they control economies, and they don't have much say in what energy companies choose to do. We can presume that U.S. companies, which for a considerable while seemed unable or unwilling to increase production, have concluded that it's in their economic interest to nudge production higher now.

All that said, there are things presidents can do at the margins, and Biden has shown himself to be adept at that which he can control. In particular, he began releasing oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve beginning in March of 2022, in an effort to mitigate high oil and gasoline prices. As of a month ago, the U.S. has sold around 180 million barrels of oil at an average price of $96.25 a barrel. Oil and gasoline prices are now far lower than last March, and although there are many explanatory factors (such as consumers driving less, and a sluggish world economy), Biden's release surely helped. And get this: The U.S. is now replenishing those stocks at a substantially lower price than what it sold them for, and has thus turned a nifty $4 billion profit in the process. Way to go Joe.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.