The oil industry helpmates at CNSNews.com always made sure to blame President Biden for rising gas prices despite never offering any actual proof that policies like discontinuing the Keystone XL pipeline played any role in that. So when Biden released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a bid to lower prices, CNS attacked him for that too. Susan Jones huffed in an Oct. 6 “news” article:
President Joe Biden has been draining the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a rapid clip, and he’s not done yet.
On Wednesday, on the way to Florida, Biden’s spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre announced that the president “is determined” to make progress in bringing down gasoline prices:
“At the president’s direction, the Department of Energy will deliver another 10 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the market next month as part of the historic 180-million-barrel release the President ordered back in March. And the President will continue to direct SPR releases as necessary,” she said.
Whoa, say critics, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).
“Well, it’s called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s not the political petroleum reserve,” Cotton told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday night.
Jones then complained that Biden was inaccurate about how the SPR oil was being released:
On November 23, 2021 — three months before Russia invaded Ukraine — President Biden announced that he would release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower “elevated gas prices at the pump” and home-heating bills.
Then, on March 31, 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden announced that he was authorizing the release of 1 million barrels of oil a day — over 180 million barrels — from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for six months.
“This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year,” Biden said at the time. “And it is by far the largest release from our national reserve in our history. It will provide a historic amount of supply for a historic amount of time — a six-month bridge to the fall.”
The Energy Department said the latest 10 million barrel release is part of Biden’s earlier, 180-million barrel announcement. So the SPR was not depleted by a million barrels for 180 days, as Biden said it would be.
The same day, Melanie Arter uncritically quoted Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty repeating the same RNC-assigned talking point: “What is supposed to be the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, what they’re calling it now I think is the Strategic Political Reserve, because their eyes are on the November elections. They’re trying to get gas prices down, and that’s what this is all about. They’re out pleading with Iran, with Venezuela.” Hagerty didn’t explain why it’s a bad idea to want to lower gas prices.
Jones grumbled in a Oct. 17 article that a Biden administration official pointed out that there’s plenty of oil in the SPR:
“There are still 400 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Reserve. It is more than half full,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told “Fox News Sunday.”
“I think people don’t quite have the capacity number in their head,” Bernstein said. “And the largest draw that we’ve ever done that President Biden presided over in March is 180 million barrels.
“So, the fact is, there is capacity to use the SPR to deal with some of the energy shocks we’re seeing in the world. But I’m not saying we will. That’s up to the president to decide; he hasn’t made that decision yet,” Bernstein said.
[…]At the end of September, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had dropped to a 38-year low, with 416,389,000 barrels of oil — 34.74 percent below the 638,086,000 barrels at the end of January 2021, when Joe Biden became president. The SPR’s current maximum capacity is 714,000,000 barrels.
An Oct. 20 article by Jones noted Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pointing out that the U.S. bveing “on a wartime footing” justified an additional SPR release, then peddled more RNC talking points:
President Biden, in announcing the SPR release on Wednesday, dismissed Republican claims that the move was a politically motivated bid to lower gas prices ahead of the midterm election.
“Look, it’s makes sense,” Biden told reporters after making the announcement at the White House. “I’ve been doing this for how long now? It’s not politically motivated at all.”
Arter followed that with an article the same day on how Biden “denied Wednesday that his decision to release an additional 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is politically motivated,” and intern Lauren Shank added her own article on White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying that “the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created for this time, for a moment just like this, when there is a supply disruption that is – has been caused by Putin’s war.” But Jones returned to parroting Republican talking points:
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists for national security,” former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News on Wednesday, after President Joe Biden announced another drawdown – 15 million barrels — in an attempt to bring gasoline prices down before the midterm election.
Biden said the move was not politically motivated.
But Pence said the drawdown “doesn’t make any sense.”
Patrick Goodenough wrote an article that day headlined “Rubio: ‘Oil Reserves Do Not Exist to Win Midterms; They Exist to Help This Country in an Emergency'” — even though the first part of the article repeated Biden’s stance on releasing more oil from the SPR and the Rubio quote didn’t appear until the 11th paragraph of the article.
Goodenough used an Oct. 27 article to tout a Saudi Arabian official taking a swipe at the Biden administration tapping into the SPR as a response to the country reducing oil production:
As the Biden administration ponders the path ahead in its strained relationship with Riyadh over oil production cuts, the Saudi energy minister has warned that decisions by some to use emergency oil stocks “may become painful in the months to come.”
Abdulaziz bin Salman said that “people” were using emergency oil reserves to manipulate markets rather than their intended purpose of mitigating shortages of supply.
In a further apparent swipe at the United States, he insinuated that the U.S. reaction to the October 5 decision by OPEC+ to reduce oil production by two million barrels a day had been an immature one.
The comments by the minister, at a major investment forum in Riyadh with a number of Americans present, are a further sign that the kingdom is not backing down in the dispute with one of its most important and longstanding allies.
Jones fretted again in a Nov. 4 article — echoing Republican talking points, of course — that Biden used the SPR to lower gas prices:
Ahead of the midterm election, President Biden often takes credit for reducing gasoline prices, but the reduction comes at the expense of the nation’s emergency oil stockpile.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has just dipped below 400 million barrels, a low not seen since May 1984.
For the week ending October 28, there were 399,792,000 barrels of oil in the SPR, a 37.34 percent decrease from the 638,086,000 barrels in the SPR when Biden took office. The maximum capacity is 714,000,000 barrels.
The chart below shows the Biden drain, which hasn’t stopped.
Jones then rushed to the defense of the oil industry, as CNS often does:
President Biden, meanwhile, continues to vilify the U.S. oil industry as greedy, even anti-American.
On the campaign trail in New Mexico Thursday, Biden again threatened to hit oil companies with a windfall profits tax:
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices soaring around the world,” Biden said.
[…]Biden came into office vowing to “end fossil fuel, and I am not going to cooperate with them,” he said in 2019.
The American Petroleum Institute this week released a plan to “restore U.S. energy leadership.”
CNS has previously done stenography for the API to help it deflect from valid criticism that oil industry profits are obscenely high.