One of the spite-driven moves that Joe Biden and the Democrats undertook when they first got into office was to immediately cripple the American oil industry, even going so far as to halt the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline on day one. It was a move that was more of a virtue signal and a figurative middle finger to Trump than anything else, sending the signal that the administration that ran on being “not Trump” was going to keep its promises for better or worse.
The Biden admin later admitted that the move was in the “worse” column, but it never stopped trumpeting itself as being an “eco-friendly” administration by always coming down as hard as it could on the oil industry. As the Democrats have always seen oil and gas as the enemy, it was only natural for the Biden admin to abuse it, even to the detriment of the American people.
Now that the American people have had it with the effect this has had on the economy and the amount they’re paying at the pump, the Biden admin is now mired in regret for its treatment of the industry and is now doing the only thing it can to make it seem like it’s always been friendly toward it; lie.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Biden admin is now claiming that it’s handed out more drilling permits than even Donald Trump did during his time in office, which is blatantly false. Interior Department documents reviewed by the Beacon showed that the Biden admin has approved fewer than 1,000 oil permits in the first three years compared to Trump’s during the same time frame. Meanwhile, Biden’s people are dolling out drilling permit data claiming the opposite.
While environmental groups are attempting to use the false data to make it seem like Biden is far friendlier to oil and gas companies than the actually is, the Beacon reported that the House Natural Resources Committee is speaking the truth against the lie, including calling out the admin for giving different numbers to journalists than they are Congress:
“From the beginning, the Biden administration has waged a war on domestic energy producers. Despite claims to the contrary, his administration has not permitted more oil and gas drilling permits than the previous administration,” a House Natural Resources Committee spokesman told the Free Beacon. “Despite having the worst leasing records in U.S. history, the Department of the Interior has attempted to take credit for record oil and gas production which is occurring on lands leased under previous administrations.”
“Even more unsettling, the Department is providing different data to journalists than to Congress,” the spokesman continued. “These kinds of discrepancies are troubling, but like a bad ex-boyfriend, this administration continues to gaslight and mislead the public for their own political gain.”
To get specific, the Bureau of Land Management shows that 3,377 permits were issued in 2023, supposedly outpacing the 2,507 that Trump’s admin approved in its third year in office. This would bring the total number of permits approved to 9,522, leaps and bounds over the 6,541 permits approved by the Trump admin. This was heralded as a victory by press outlets like Politico, despite them all being eco-warriors in every other situation.
But the real numbers were revealed later when technical errors they blamed on the Trump administration were fixed according to the Beacon:
The spokesman added that the agency couldn’t vouch for the data from the Politico report in January. And he noted the “online reporting tool can be interpreted in various ways.”
BLM’s online system was undergoing a system outage at the time of this report.
In February 2023, meanwhile, BLM quietly revised separate figures, lowering the number of unused fossil fuel drilling permits it had approved. The agency changed that number from 9,000 unused permits to less than 6,700, blaming the error on a Trump-era technical change.
The actual number from the Trump administration was 10,795. I’m not a mathematician, but that seems a far larger number to “less than 6,700.”
“Our operators are habitually held up by slow leasing and permitting, with leasing particularly affecting out years,” Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the oil industry group Western Energy Alliance, told the Beacon. “The full impact of the Biden administration’s slowdown on leasing won’t be seen in permitting numbers until subsequent years out.”
This isn’t the first lie about numbers the Biden admin has told, but the fact that it’s now lying about its friendliness toward oil and gas after it displayed a clear bias against it from the very beginning of the administration’s time in office would be hilarious if it wasn’t so damaging to the nation.
It’s also proof that the Biden administration is willing to say anything to pass off the idea that it’s actually good for the nation, which is going to be a hard sell to anyone who has had to fill up their gas tank recently.
Maybe the media will get around to fact-checking the administration’s claims, but I doubt it. I’d put the countdown timer for that at somewhere around seven years.
