Could be. I'm certainly disappointed in Biden. (Course, I never liked him much in the first place. I was voting against, not voting for.)
Chances are he won't be running in 2024. He should take this opportunity to dramatically re-align our foreign policy priorities, strengthening military, diplomatic, and commercial/economic ties with what we used to call the First World (Canada, Western Europe, Oceania, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea), wooing India and Mexico, and making it crystal clear to the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa that access to the aid, money, tech, and other goodies of our alliance depends on visible progress on human rights and consistently playing nice with the First World.
He doesn't need to (or shouldn't) worry about being re-elected.
This Thread has been quiet for quite some time, so in the spirit of getting it back on track:
Last week, as U.S. gas and home heating prices hit new highs and his approval ratings new lows, President Biden decided to play the blame game. He asked the head of the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether oil companies have been illegally increasing prices. But there’s no mystery as to why energy prices are up. The president need look no farther than his own White House.
On the very first day of his presidency, Biden vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported an addition 830,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil to refineries on the Gulf coast, further reducing America’s dependence on riskier imports.
It’s a poorly kept secret that Russia has now replaced Mexico and Saudi Arabia as the second largest U.S. oil supplier. Yes, that’s right: the U.S. is importing
844,000 bpd from Vladimir Putin.
Canada is still the number one source of oil imports to the U.S. But Keystone XL would have guaranteed several more decades of energy security and affordability. The oilsands are the third largest proven oil reserves in the world, and, unlike with conventional oil wells, their production rates do not decline over time.
Canada is an old and reliable ally of the United States. In terms of energy supply, if the choice is OPEC, Russia or us,
the choice should be obvious. As a former Montana governor said, “You don’t have to send the national guard to Alberta.”
The Biden administration’s message to America’s energy sector was clear: You are now a sunset industry
apple.news
Anyway, more at the above LINK, but:
Fast forward to July: with gas prices spiking, the president publicly
asked OPEC to increase its output, in hopes of offsetting growing demand as the U.S. and other economies recover from COVID. OPEC predictably ignored him.
The higher oil prices rise, the happier its members are.
But why would a president want to increase Americans’ energy dependency on the most politically unstable region in the world? Many of his advisers may have been in diapers but Mr. Biden was a senator in the 1970s, when OPEC embargoes tripled the global price of oil not once but twice.
Then in August Biden handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban, sworn enemy of the West in general and the U.S. in particular. The U.S. withdrawal gives radical Islamic movements another safe base from which to wage “holy war” against Israel and the West. It also leaves them state-of-the-art military equipment that can and will be used to destabilize Iraq, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia — that is, the very core of OPEC. Despite the Abraham Accords, the Middle East seems likely to remain politically unstable and hostile to U.S. interests.
Is this really the region Americans want to depend on for energy security and affordability?
Which brings us to the recent COP26 climate change meetings in Glasgow, where the president proudly
announced that high energy prices are not “a reason to back off our clean energy goals” but rather “a call to action … [and] only reinforce the urgent need to diversify sources.” But now, less than a week after claiming the mantle of climate change leadership, he has ordered the release of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down the price of gasoline?
As domestic production stagnates and then declines, the U.S. will become more dependent on imported oil. Unless Washington reverses direction on new oil pipelines from Canada — such as Keystone — this means more dependence on OPEC.
So, on that happy note, where are “we” (North America that is) on the whole Line 5 thing that’s taken a backseat in the news as of late?