VIDEO: Energy Sec. Granholm Demands Investment From Firms She Wants To Put Out Of Business
Previously tonight we visited the question topmost for watchers of American politics in the Biden Era – are these people this stupid, or do they just think we are?
In that other post, in which DNC poo-bah, former Congressman and recently ejected White House staffer Cedric Richmond peddled the bizarre lie that had the administration convinced Congress to spend the $6 trillion Build Back Better bacchanal it would have brought inflation down, our conclusion was that Richmond was simply a mendacious bad-faith actor insulting the intelligence of the American people.
But in this clip, we’re coming to the opposite conclusion. Because what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, an utterly failed governor of Michigan who last year caused a stir by laughing off questions about oil production when she said it was Russia and OPEC who controlled the price of oil just a year after the U.S.A. had been the world’s largest supplier of oil and a net energy exporter, says here isn’t just a lie.
It’s a lie intelligent people wouldn’t bother to peddle.
Here’s the clip. It’ll blow your mind.
The stupidity of this can’t be overstated. Granholm is demanding that ExxonMobil, Chevron and the rest increase oil production and refinery throughput now, almost in the same sentence where she proudly proclaims that within a decade she wants their products to be worthless.
Who would accept THAT deal?
This while trying to sell the idea that if there was a fat surtax on oil company profits that would somehow lower oil prices.
Those oil companies are taking profits off high gas prices now for a number of reasons, most of them directly related to the attacks Granholm’s party have been making on them.
First, Democrats at the federal and state level and among the leftist advosphere have been pressuring the financial industry not to provide capital for oil companies to drill for or refine petroleum. That’s been deliberately done as a means of accomplishing what Granholm says she wants in five or 10 years.
Second, the regulatory storm affecting those oil companies’ ability to explore for and produce new oilfields has been more aggressive than ever. So particularly in light of the sudden difficulty in getting financing for new plays, those companies have chosen to just milk their current production areas, the cost of production from which has already been put on the books, and get maximum dollars out of their currently producing wells.
Third, given the attack on new oil pipelines, not just the Keystone XL project but many others, it’s harder to move oil particularly from new production areas to the refineries. Without the construction of new pipelines the oil has to be transported by trucks or rail, and there’s only so much capacity to be had in either one. Team Biden has all but destroyed the trucking industry with regulatory attacks and it’s busily interfering with our rail network by trying to insert passenger trains on commercial tracks across the country. So transporting oil from production areas to refineries doesn’t work like it should.
And fourth, they’ve come down on oil refineries with regulatory attacks, too. So it’s more expensive to refine oil and the refineries are disincentivized to take on any projects that would upgrade their capacities. Granholm and Biden are braying about the need for the refiners to up their production, but that doesn’t just happen – those are projects which run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and they take years to bring off. A lot of them were canceled over the past year and a half when their owners saw which way the wind was blowing.
And they certainly wouldn’t commit to a, say, $300 million facility upgrade at a refinery Granholm says will be obsolete in five to 10 years.
Everything she’s saying is a fantasy. But it’s so obviously ridiculous it doesn’t even work as a lie to fleece the rubes. You have to be a certifiable moron to think any of this is workable. So while we’ll go with “shameless liar” on Richmond, here we’ll say “blithering nincompoop” on Granholm.
