AS I SEE IT
By Neal A. Shipman
Farmer Editor
Since taking office, President Joe Biden and his administration have made it pretty clear that they want to replace oil and other fossil fuels with wind and solar power. Upon becoming president, he cancelled the Keystone Pipeline that would not only have brought Canadian oil into the United States but would have served as a major pipeline take-away for Bakken oil. He paused federal oil leasing sales and made it more and more difficult to build new pipelines that carry natural gas and oil across the country.
At the time, those policies may have sounded good and no doubt appeased the Green Movement. But now as Americans are seeing record high gas and energy costs as a result of high oil prices brought on following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the validity of that rapid rush to shut down America’s oil and gas industry is being called into question.
There is no doubt that Russia’s invasion helped spur the increase of oil prices to above $100 per barrel, but oil experts had already been saying that oil prices were going to rise as the world came out of the COVID-19 pandemic and world oil supplies were not keeping up with the demand.