In order to fight the high gasoline prices, President Biden ordered the release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Biden spoke from the White House in permitting a large release from the reserve saying that an average of one-million barrels of oil will be put on the U.S. market each day for six months. The Biden Administration argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is largely to blame for the rising global oil prices.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska released a statement after the president announced that he would release 180 million barrels of emergency oil reserves over the next few months:
“Earlier this week, the President proposed to raise taxes on domestic energy producers by tens of billions of dollars. Today, he announced he will sell off a substantial portion of our emergency oil reserves. While this may increase supply temporarily, it is like selling off the insurance policy. It does little to increase domestic production. What he laid out isn’t a responsible plan; it’s the weakest possible effort to shift blame for rising gas prices. The administration can come up with all of the half-baked strategies it wants, including ideas from the past that have repeatedly been rejected, but they will fail to solve the fundamental problem staring them in the face until they embrace the need for more domestic production. For the administration to claim they are doing everything they can to increase production is a fantasy.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan took to Twitter to say:
“Mr. President, there’s a much better strategic petroleum reserve for America that you need to tap into – that’s called Alaska. Call us, and please get your boot off our neck.”
He echoed similar sentiment in a recent interview with Fox News:
“The president is now talking about ‘well this is Putin’s price hikes’. We know that that is ridiculous. This is what they have done from day one and the other thing that is hurting us is that they are going around the world saying, ‘we probably do need more energy so we’re going to beg dictators in Venezuela and Iran for energy’. It’s a very simple solution here, which is get the boot of the federal government off the neck of American energy producers and workers. We had energy independence 15 months ago.”
According to the office of Sen. Murkowski, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) contains approximately 588 million barrels of oil that are to be released in the event of “severe energy supply interruptions,” not simply rising prices that have been worsened by 15 months of misguided administration policy. Additionally, the office states that a large-scale SPR sale may temporarily reduce global oil prices by a small amount, but is insufficient to offset the current price increase, sending the wrong signal for domestic production, and runs the risk of leaving the U.S. short-handed on emergency reserves in the event of a longer-term crisis. Murkowski said that in the past four weeks, the President announced a separate selloff of 30 million barrels from the SPR, which did not restrain prices.
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