The U.S. Government Doesn’t Control Domestic Oil Production. But It Should – By Amy Westervelt (The Intercept) / March 11, 2022
The oil and gas industry won’t increase production because it’s enjoying the profits from high prices.
THIS WEEK, as President Biden banned the import of Russian oil and gas, fuel prices skyrocketed, and pundits and Substack bros across the land repeated the company line we all know by heart now: We need to drill more and increase production.
It’s a rallying cry that makes no sense. On top of the fact that there’s no such thing as an “immediate” increase in oil and gas production, if anything this crisis is one more reason to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. And in the meantime, since the industry is going to blame the government for everything anyway, a little intervention would actually be helpful here, not to help the oil and gas companies but to rein them in and actually help the American public.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an embargo on exporting oil to the U.S. due to its support of Israel in the war. The result was rationing, miles-long lines at gas stations, a whole lot of headlines questioning our dependency on foreign oil, and ultimately a huge boom in energy efficiency and non-fossil energy in the U.S. The oil industry, of course, claimed that the shortages were all the government’s fault for refusing to let them drill more in the years preceding the embargo.
In 2012, when it was already clear that the fracking boom was headed for a bust, the fossil fuel lobby began pushing hard to lift the ban on exporting American oil and gas. The policy had been in place since that 1970s oil crisis in an effort to insulate Americans from the volatility of the global energy market. But suddenly, exporting was the industry’s last hope to maybe turn a profit on fracking, so the math changed. The story they told was one of national security and energy independence, a return to global superpower status. Their efforts paid off in 2015 when President Barack Obama lifted the ban.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/oil-prices-russia-ban/
