WASHINGTON — As the war in Ukraine has sent gasoline prices soaring, Republicans in Congress have focused on their favorite scapegoat — the Democrats.
One target of opportunity is Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids. The National Republican Congressional Committee released an ad Thursday holding her accountable.
“Sharice Davids and Joe Biden crippled American energy production,” the ad says. “Now you’re paying the price.”
The ad — one among a batch aimed at Democrats perceived as vulnerable in this year’s congressional elections — is in stride with a larger push by Republicans to promote increased domestic energy production.
Missouri and Kansas lawmakers have loudly joined the chorus.
In the past two weeks Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley proposed a bill he said would “restore America’s energy independence.” Kansas Sens. Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran sent a letter to President Biden urging him to increase domestic energy production (along with a request that he bar the U.S. import of Russian oil, which Biden did this week). Kansas Rep. Ron Estes asked people to sign a petition calling for American energy independence.
Politicians have often blamed the party in power when gas prices start to soar. The call for American energy independence goes back to the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo sparked long gas lines. The beleaguered Carter administration had to create a system for allowing people access to the pump based on their license plate numbers.
Energy independence is premised on the simple idea that if America produces all that it needs at home, it’s no longer reliant on other countries. That means more jobs, shored up national security and an economy insulated from shock waves to the global energy supply.
A strong campaign message. But in a global economy, the concept of American energy independence is far more complicated — and doesn’t guarantee quick relief at the gas station.
“Whether the United States is energy independent or not, quote unquote, energy independent, the prices of oil and everything that comes from oil, like gasoline, are set in a global market,” said Victor McFarland, an associate professor at the University of Missouri who specializes in energy and the environment. “And we’re vulnerable to changes in those prices, whether or not the United States produces the oil we consume at home.”
A global market
Let’s say Congress passed a law that required every oil producer in the country to ramp up their production to the absolute maximum. So they boost investment in oil wells and fracking, where drills inject high pressure liquid and materials to produce oil or natural gas from deep in the ground.
First, that would take months. Second, it would only add around an additional 1 million barrels of oil a day. In other words, 1% of the global oil market, since the world consumes an average of 100 million barrels of oil a day.
“So it’ll bring prices down, but not that much,” McFarland said. “And it certainly wouldn’t be instant, big relief for the kind of pain that people are feeling at the pump right now.”
Already high because of supply chain issues due to the pandemic, the global market for oil has increased because of the war. Along with the United States banning the import of Russian oil, companies like Shell had already stopped buying Russian oil for publicity reasons. Markets are also sensitive to uncertainty of any kind. In this case, it’s uncertainty over whether the conflict will worsen, whether Russia will cut off oil to Western Europe, and whether the pipelines that run through Ukraine will be destroyed by daily bombing and shelling.
But, given the price increases, Republicans have been quick to also blame environmental policies they say limit the amount of oil and gas the country produces.
After Biden took office, his administration made a couple moves that irritated Republicans and the fossil fuel industry. It officially canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and it said it would not issue new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.
Those decisions attracted criticism, but haven’t significantly affected energy production in the short term. Oil and gas companies signed leases before Biden took office and could technically open up more drilling on the federal land at any time.
“Even if Biden changed that policy and allowed more new leases on federal land, that wouldn’t yield any results for years, because we’re talking about brand new wells,” McFarland said. “They’d have to go and explore and drill and that takes a long time.”
Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, said the transition from former President Donald Trump to Biden hasn’t really affected the fossil fuel industry. Construction on the Keystone XL pipeline didn’t move forward significantly when Trump was in office and only one of the four pipelines pending on his watch moved forward — the Dakota Access.
The biggest reason the U.S. has been able to increase its energy output has been more to do with natural gas, not crude oil. That came as a result to innovations in fracking technology in the past two decades. Natural gas does not power the internal combustion engines that are in most cars and hasn’t significantly reduced our dependence on foreign oil. The majority of our oil imports come from Canada.
Hirs co-authored a paper in 2010 arguing for the U.S. to impose an embargo on all foreign imports of crude oil. The paper found that an embargo similar to one imposed by former President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, would bolster national security by eliminating our reliance on oil from other countries, while providing more jobs in the domestic energy sector.
But there was a catch. It’s more expensive to produce oil in America than it is in other countries, like Saudi Arabia and Russia. That means prices for gasoline would go up.
“The challenge here is that both parties understand that if the price goes up at the pump, incumbents are not reelected,” Hirs said. “It’s a pretty sorry situation, when the national interests of the nation reside more in the price of the pump versus the onset of the greatest military conflict Europe has seen in 70 years.”
The push for green energy
Republicans aren’t the only ones using rising gasoline prices to argue for a change in domestic energy policy.
On Thursday, the White House tweeted that a transition to electric vehicles will eventually reduce the world’s reliance on crude oil, instantly sparking backlash from Republicans.
“Or we could have energy security today if Joe Biden would stop holding American energy and the American people hostage to his left wing enviro politics,” Hawley tweeted.
Still, as it becomes more expensive for people to fill up their gas tanks for cars with internal combustion engines, some are arguing this will make those who can afford them more likely to purchase electric vehicles, accelerating the transition from crude oil, which is mostly used for gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel.
The electricity that powers our cars, homes and office buildings is a mixture of natural gas, coal and renewable energy. A natural gas boom that followed innovations in hydraulic fracturing and vertical drilling has caused the United States to consume less energy than it produces. (It also accelerated the decline of coal in Appalachia, which Republicans effectively pinned on Democrats, saying they declared a “War on Coal.”)
The bipartisan infrastructure law passed late last year included $5 billion for states to build more electric vehicle charging stations in an effort to make electric cars more feasible outside of urban areas where they are more common.
Shifting toward electric vehicles wouldn’t necessarily free the country from reliance on foreign resources. Electric vehicles are mineral intensive, meaning they use more nickel, lithium, cobalt and other elements. Those metals are mined in places like Russia or the Congo. The war in Ukraine has caused the price of nickel to spike, illustrating how disruptive a war can be to a globalized economy.
That creates a different potential supply chain problem, where rather than the daily usage of a vehicle, shortages would create a different problem, jacking up the prices for new cars but not affecting those that are already on the road.
“When you produce oil and gas, they’re not something that you store over the long term, you produce them, ship them, you burn them, it’s a continuous supply chain,” McFarland said. “If any of those steps are interrupted people feel it very quickly.”
McFarland said if history has shown him anything, it’s that a push for energy independence won’t necessarily change things because as long as the country relies on fossil fuels it will still be at the whim of the global energy market, which sets prices.
“Achieving energy independence by producing more oil and gas is not a long term solution,” McFarland said. “The lesson that I wish we had taken from the 1970s is we need to be less dependent on oil and gas in general and not just trying to produce more oil and gas at home.”
