The Big Oil Lie: How Oil Profits Tripled Under Biden, But Both Parties Refuse To Acknowledge Them As Trump Promises To ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’
This report completely exposes the hypocrisy among Republicans and Democrats regarding oil and natural resources and our wars, and how Trump’s plan to lower inflation by drilling oil is a fallacy.
The following report was first published on August 16th, 2024, and updated on September 2nd on winepressnews.com.
If you have listened to mainstream media, pundits and politicians in recent years, one might assume that oil and gas production in the United States has declined or at the very least stagnated, due to the tight policies of President Joe Biden; who and his Democratic party had made it out to be that they were champions of alternative energy sources and leading the charge into renewables.
After all, for example, the Biden administration lauded the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022, touted as being “the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history,” according to the White House, and supposedly confronting “the existential threat of the climate crisis and set forth a new era of American innovation and ingenuity to lower consumer costs and drive the global clean energy economy forward.” In 2021 during his visit at COP26, Biden said that he would “transform the largest economy in the world into a thriving, innovative, equitable, and just clean energy engine of net zero for a net-zero world.” Or how about when one of Biden’s first immediate acts as President was to shutdown the Keystone XL pipeline?
On the flipside, former President Trump and the GOP have contended that Biden’s oil and gas policies have been a disaster and are harming everyday Americans. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said in June, “From day one, President Biden has done nothing but attack American energy. He paused new oil and gas leases. He canceled the Keystone pipeline. He prioritized foreign energy over domestic energy, which means he prioritized foreign jobs over domestic jobs. The Department of Energy and the EPA are releasing rules and regulations at a neck-breaking speed.”
Landry was joined by a number of Republican governors who lambasted Biden’s policies and demanded that the U.S. needs to increase its output capacity. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum also said at the time, “We’re producing about 13 million barrels of oil a day. We should be doing 15, 16, 18, 20 million barrels of oil a day. That would be not just energy independence, that would be energy dominance. We’d be selling that to our allies instead of our allies having to buy from our enemies.”
Trump has of course been a continual critic of Biden’s energy policies and has routinely berated Biden for his actions. Trump has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that if re-elected he wants to “drill, drill, drill.” Nikki Haley, who later dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, said that her administration would “get EPA out of the way” to help make America “energy dominant.”
Yet in what is perhaps one of the more political paradoxes seen in recent times, oil production under President Biden ballooned, profits roughly tripled, and exports of both oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) vastly increased. This irony, which has received inadequate press attention and acknowledgement from either camp, stands as a big fly in the ointment for what both Presidents and parties have said.
Profits And Exports Boomed Under Biden
Though Biden and Democrats leaned heavily into green policies and transformation, Biden made it clear before he was elected that not too much would change policy wise from Trump’s administration. Salon reported in 2019: “Joe Biden to rich donors: “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected.” Biden made sure to schmooze the ‘ritzy donors’ that “no one’s standard of living will change,” and promised not to impose tax hikes on them.
In truth, according to a Financial Times report earlier this year, profits for the biggest U.S. oil and gas producers have almost tripled under President Joe Biden,” even though those in the industry have warned that a second term would be “disastrous.”
The FT added: The country’s top-10 listed operators by value, which will finish reporting their 2023 earnings this week, are on track to have amassed combined net income of $313bn in the first three years of the Biden administration, up from $112bn during the same period under Donald Trump.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a set of charts that also document this record energy production during the Biden administration. Nonresident Senior Fellow for the group, Roger Pielke Jr., said in his piece: “Many people I talk to are surprised to learn that U.S. oil and natural gas production and exports are in record territory under the term of the Biden administration.” Monthly crude oil production has continued to peak since 2020.
And not just production, but exports have also steadily climbed since 2021.
The same could be said for LNG production and exports as well.
OilPrice.com corroborated that the U.S. was the world’s top LNG exporter in 2023.
Reuters also highlighted these windfall profits and production in a report that highlighted the Biden-Trump oil paradox, saying, “The counter-intuitive fossil fuel boom under Biden reflects an awkward truth for his supporters and detractors alike ahead of the November elections, proving that what happens in globally interconnected markets like oil and gas is often well outside the immediate control of the person in the White House.”
Not only did profits rise under Biden, but so did dividends for its shareholders as well. As OilPrice.com noted, “Against All Odds American Oil Soars Under Biden,” and ‘investors have been handsomely rewarded under the Biden administration.”
Reuters added: U.S. oil production, meanwhile, has also hit record highs under Biden, continuing to outpace rivals Saudi Arabia and Russia. The U.S. also produces more natural gas than ever, pulling record volumes from wells that spread from Texas to Pennsylvania. As a result, American ports are sending record volumes of both abroad, including to allies in Europe who are weaning themselves off Russia for energy supplies.
Additionally, “dividend payments and share buybacks by the top five oil companies were $111 billion during the first three years of the Biden administration, a 57% increase over the first three years of Trump’s presidency, according to the data,” Reuters noted.
Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, said, “You could make an argument that the industry has been more productive, relatively speaking, under this president than ever before.”
Broken Promises
These windfall profits and increased output contradict Biden’s claims of going green. Critics, as noted by Reuters and The FT, have argued that these actions are due to rising prices at the gas pump, which soared amid the turmoil of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and strain from a surge in post-COVID demand, Reuters wrote.
But the White House has tried to claim that this does not contradict its stated goals to decarbonize and subsidize green technologies. In a statement to Reuters, the White House said: “President Biden has led and delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda in history, restoring America’s climate leadership at home and abroad. As we make the historic investments needed to transition to a clean energy economy, record domestic oil and gas production is helping to meet our immediate needs.”
However, during Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address, the President did not tout these record gains. But as Robert Rapier for OilPrice.com pointed out, Biden “barely mentioned energy at all” during the speech. Rapier gave two reasons why that might have been:
“Record U.S. oil and gas production are inconvenient facts that run contrary to the administration’s stated objectives. Despite the attacks from Republicans, Biden is probably not keen to remind his base that U.S. oil and gas production both continue to grow.
“A second factor may be that Biden knows that record production comes despite his policies, and not because of them. Presidents regularly take credit for things that they had little to do with, but in this case, Biden’s policies have been working to thwart continued expansion of oil and gas. As such, it may have been especially disingenuous to take credit for this.”
Moreover, the Center for Biological Diversity deplored Biden’s failed campaign promises to start 2023, claiming the Biden ‘administration has ignored petitions from hundreds of climate, conservation, Indigenous and environmental justice groups’ to phase-out federal oil and gas production.
The group added: ‘Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years. The Biden administration’s policy of fossil fuel expansion contradicts the clear climate science that fossil fuel growth must be stopped and governments must phase out fossil fuels to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.’
Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement: “Two years of runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires phasing out fossil fuel extraction, but instead we’re still racing in the opposite direction.”
As profits and production began to noticeably soar, only a small amount of press coverage was given highlighting this. In 2023, one headline by Jacobin read, “Joe Biden Is Almost as Pro-Drilling as Trump.” In September that same year, the Wall Street Journal reported that ‘the Biden administration plans to schedule three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years, a reversal of the president’s campaign promise to stop all new offshore drilling under his administration.’
Detailing his hypocrisy at the time in 2023, Public Citizen reminded readers: As a candidate, Biden pledged to advocate for “no more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.”’ The advocacy group, which is in of favor supposed green alternatives and cutting back on the use of fossil fuels, added: ‘Yet under Biden, the U.S. government continues to lease land for drilling and issue permits for drilling at a frightening pace. In the coming months, energy companies are likely to mount a well-funded campaign to continue business as usual.
Yet nevertheless, Biden in 2022 would blast Exxon Mobil for making “more money than God.”
SEE: Biden Admin Refuses To Refill Strategic Oil Reserves Because The Price Is Too High
Drill, Baby, Drill
But this paradox goes in both directions, as it also exposes a common fallacy oft-repeated by President Donald Trump, members of the Republican party and conservative pundits alike.
The Financial Times said in its report: “It also flies in the face of Republican arguments that the Biden administration has suffocated the industry and dire warnings that a Democratic victory in November’s presidential election would put American energy security at risk.”
GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said in March, “Since his first day in office, President Biden has targeted our domestic energy producers and actively undermined America’s efforts to be energy independent,” followed by the chorus of Republicans who keep blasting Biden for ruining America’s energy boon, as noted earlier in this report, even though the data shows otherwise.
Be that as it may, that has not stopped President Trump from habitually saying that if re-elected he will “drill, baby, drill!” In July at this year’s Republican National Convention in Wisconsin, Trump said exactly just that: “We will drill, baby, drill,” followed by chants from the audience. “We will do it at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” he added.
He went on to blame Biden and Harris for “taking our energy policies and destroyed them, and then they immediately went back to them, but by that time so much was lost.”
Then, several days later, at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, once again, Trump said he would “drill, baby, drill” when elected. He told the audience: “We will end the Biden-Harris war on American energy, and we will drill, baby, drill. Under the Trump administration, we had energy independence, and soon we will have energy dominance. We will be more dominant than any country by far, and we were just four years ago.”
And again last week, Trump reiterated this point when taking questions from his support base. During a segment of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Trump was asked by a voter from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota – who said he regularly helps five of his eight children financially, as they are “struggling” to afford basic necessities – “How are you going to make the economy—not just the food and electricity—but bring down the rent prices, the housing prices, so that these kids can survive without their parents’ help?,” the man asked.
Trump responded with:
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill, we’re gonna bring down the cost of energy,” he said. “Energy’s what caused the worst inflation, I think, in the history of our country. Food prices are up 50%, sometimes more. You look at bacon. Bacon has quadrupled. You can’t order bacon, you can’t order anything. We’re living horribly. […] And then we’re going to have China and all of these countries that were treating us good when I was there – it took me a long time to get them to behave properly.”
These repeated statements simply do not align with the data – something Trump and the GOP apparently do not want to acknowledge.
But that has not stopped liberal mainstream media from fearmongering that if Trump is re-elected he will destroy all the progress Biden has made with green energy, and would accelerate climate change; or at least that’s what Chris Hayes at MSNBC would have his audience to believe, completely ignoring Biden’s record oil and LNG profits and exports.
In short, when realizing the data, Pielke Jr. from the AEI summed it up:
Looking at the time series above, it might be fair to conclude that the “drill, baby, drill” president is whichever one happens to be in office, regardless their party or policies. The biggest difference might be simply how they talk about energy.
The U.S. is currently the world’s energy superpower. The more important questions are not about who wants to “drill, baby, drill,” but rather, what sorts of U.S. policies make sense given where we are today.
Year-in and year-out, Presidents have made declarations to become “energy independent,” something the Trump administration lauded in 2018 when it declared the U.S. had become energy independent under him in such a short time. However, this is something, as Foreign Policy described it, ‘Every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has pledged allegiance to the goal of “energy independence,” even as the United States has remained dependent on imported oil.’
But so-called energy independence doesn’t quite mean what it sounds like. Gregory Brew for OilPrice.com wrote in 2018:
According to Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and EPA chief Scott Pruitt in a June 2017 op-ed, energy dominance “means a self-reliant and secure nation, free from the geopolitical turmoil of other nations that seek to use energy as an economic weapon.”
Energy dominance, in other words, means “energy independence,” an oft-repeated political slogan deployed by virtually every U.S. President since Richard Nixon.
But the United States cannot be completely independent from the global energy market. Nor cannot it achieve full self-sufficiency in energy consumption while insulating itself from changes in oil and gas prices.
Separately, Nick Cunningham, also writing for OilPrice.com, explained in a 2018 article:
“Politicians have long argued that producing a ton of oil will free Americans from their dependence on foreign producers. A look at President Trump’s twitter feed will quickly demonstrate the hollowness of that claim. Even as net imports have plunged, the U.S. president has been pleading with OPEC to increase production, a perfect example of how the U.S. remains at the mercy of the global market, regardless of what happens at home.”
Bearing this in mind, both administrations have squabbled over energy independence. Trump, at an Ohio rally in March, said “We were energy independent three years ago.” He claimed Biden had “closed up the oil,” and promised to “turn it around fast” if re-elected. But in a rare admission, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer told E&E News that under the current president, the “United States is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades.”
But in truth, so-called “energy independence” is just political bingo. Andrew Campbell, executive director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told the paper that energy independence is nothing more than a “political slogan.” “That really doesn’t translate to anything that really matters to our economy in any direct way,” he said. “The concept of it, to me, doesn’t hold any meaning.”
Beit so, President Trump has made it clear that oil policies will trump (no pun intended) other promises he has made. For example, when critics began to point out that Trump had not pulled troops out of the Middle East like he promised, he admitted he didn’t follow through so the military could occupy Syria’s oil. “People said to me, ‘Why are you staying in Syria,'” Trump said during a 2020 rally. “Because I kept the oil, which frankly we should have done in Iraq. […] So they say, ‘Trump’s in Syria,’ I didn’t pull out—I did pull out. We have the oil, really secure. We’ll see what happens with it.”
He would also admit this in an interview Fox News later that year.
In 2019 the Trump administration attempted a coup in Venezuela to overthrow the communist Nicolás Maduro, and install Juan Guaidó as Washington’s guy. This ultimately failed, but later in 2023 Trump spilled the beans and admitted it was only about to occupy Venezuela’s oil. He said: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela. So we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it.”
Update: And just very recently, Maduro’s luxury private jet was seized by the U.S. – officials say, according to the AP, ‘was illegally purchased through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States in violation of sanctions and export control laws’ – Trump used the opportunity to say that it doesn’t matter because Maduro will just buy another one with all the oil money he has.
Biden renewed those same imposed sanctions on the South American country as well. SEE: Oil Wars: US Forces In Syria Caught Stealing Dozens Of Tankers Of Oil After Biden’s Retaliatory Airstrikes
Harris Defends Fracking, But Both Campaigns Keep Avoiding The Data
With Biden stepping down and Vice President Kamala Harris stepping up to bat, it will be interesting to see if this information is brought up in future debates and discussions, or will the truth continually be maligned and ignored? And should Harris win the November vote, will record oil and gas production continue?
But so far, since this article was first published in mid-August, it appears VP Harris is carrying-on the double-tongued policies of Biden: attacking the Trump administration for wanting to keep buttressing the big oil industry, while also saying she is all-in on fracking. Meanwhile, Trump expectedly still has continued to repeat that he will “drill, baby, drill,” and ripping into Harris for destroying American energy.
Harris has backtracked on her stance regarding fracking. Before becoming VP, Harris campaigned in 2019 that she would support a federal ban on fracking, joining a list of other nations that ban the practice. At the time she said “there’s no question that I am in favor of banning fracking.”
However, in a recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris was asked about her positional shift that would not ban fracking. When questioned, Harris claimed that her opinion changed in 2020 and remained that way throughout her time in the Biden administration.
“I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking, as vice president I did not ban fracking, as president I will not ban fracking,” she said. “I’m very clear about where I stand.” Harris told Bash that she has “seen that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
At the same time, the Harris campaign claims Trump wants to keep empowering and shilling for the big oil conglomerates, but did somewhat indirectly acknowledge that other energy sectors were bustling under Biden and Harris.
In a statement to NOTUS, James Singer, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said:
“Donald Trump wants to sell out America’s energy future to Big Oil executives and the Chinese Communist Party, Vice President Kamala Harris disagrees. Right now, American energy of all kinds has hit record production levels, resulting in hundreds of thousands of new jobs for American workers because of her leadership. Trump’s proposals would raise prices on consumers, pollute our air and water and take us backwards.”
NOTUS did not detail the record profits and production of oil and LNG under Biden and Harris, but claimed that the ‘Biden administration’s climate policies led to hundreds of billions of dollars of private and consumer investment over the last two years, leading to manufacturing commitments across the country at a scale not seen for decades.’
NOTUS reached out to the Trump campaign to respond to Singer’s claims and the alleged manufacturing successes under Biden and Harris. Trump’s former interior secretary, David Bernhardt, denied these successes. “Where exactly are you seeing that progress?” he questioned, contending that Trump’s deregulatory actions would aid manufacturing much more.
Last week at a rally at a steel plant in Potterville, Michigan, Donald Trump criticized Biden’s energy policies, calling it “a war on American energy.” Trump said, “Most Americans are unaware that Harris and Biden have been shutting down entire swaths of our energy and electricity infrastructure without replacing it or even talking about it, leading to spiking electricity and energy prices and also an energy shortfall like we’ve never had before.”
“My goal will be to cut your energy costs in half within 12 months of taking office,” Trump added, even promising to declare a national emergency to increase electricity generation supplies, NOTUS noted. He claimed that “Comrade Kamala” “destroyed” energy production.
“The first thing I will do to make middle class life dramatically more affordable is to end kamala’s war on American Energy, terminate her Green New [sic] scam, and drill, baby drill, we’re going to drill, baby, drill,” Trump said during his speech to a cheering audience.
So, it appears both prospecting campaigns and the media will continue to dance around these facts that are neither convenient for either of them.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Two wings, same bird: that’s all this is. It’s a gong show! At the end of the day, it is evident that all sides are quite disingenuous about their energy policies. Oil and gas profits, production and exports ballooned under Biden as per a carryover from Trump’s policies, but neither is willing to report it, let alone acknowledge it. Biden and Democrats cannot tout these numbers because it would wholly prove that their green policies are a crock; and Trump and the GOP can’t readily acknowledge this because then it would prove that he is not as great as advertised, and all his regurgitated rhetoric is nothing more than propaganda and political speak.
It’s lies, all lies. You are being lied to day-in and day-out. Truth is not allowed to be conveyed to the masses. ‘They’ must keep you fixated on these false narratives, this very elaborate reality show, soap opera drama that is far from reality. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis; Problem, Reaction, Solution: it’s called the Hegelian Dialectic.
In 1948, several years after the official end of World War II, the Smith-Mundt Act was passed. What is this act? Wikipedia gives a brief description of what this act entails:
The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-402), popularly called the Smith–Mundt Act, is the basic legislative authorization for propaganda activities conducted by the U.S. Department of State, sometimes called “public diplomacy”. The act was first introduced by Congressman Karl E. Mundt (R-SD) in January 1945 in the 79th Congress. It was subsequently passed by the 80th Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948.
This same act was then reintroduced in 2012. “Public diplomacy?” Yeah, what a nice way of saying a big fat excuse to propagandize and lie, and proliferate false drama! And yet the masses are none the wiser.
Proverbs 16:27 An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is as a burning fire. [28] A froward man soweth strife: and a whisperer separateth chief friends. [29] A violent man enticeth his neighbour, and leadeth him into the way that is not good. [30] He shutteth his eyes to devise froward things: moving his lips he bringeth evil to pass.
2 Timothy 3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
And oil is just but one of many lies that are spread, but the blatant hypocrisy from all sides is one of the more blatant examples that show whoever is President is irrelevant. In June, I reported how Biden (and now presumably Harris) was being bankrolled by Blackrock, one of the world’s largest global asset management firms, and Trump is being bankrolled by Blackstone, an investment bank and the largest private equity firm in the world.
Furthermore, both parties are both determined to fight this new Cold War with China, as two neocons said in April that both administrations firmly agree that the U.S. must ramp-up pressure against China, going as far as to say the U.S. needs to essentially blockade them, increase military production and force a coup. It’s absurd, but that’s our puppets for you. Last month, NATO leaders signed a pact that blamed China for being a “decisive enabler of Russia,” and is looking to set their sights against China now as well. And then we have Trump, this egomaniacal fool, saying he is going to get China to “behave?” Give me a break.
I detailed these seldom reported facts because I think it sufficiently demonstrates just how fake all these politics are and how fake our media is. Everything they say is a total lie. So, quite frankly, if you think your vote matters and will change anything you would be mistaken.
Proverbs 29:2 When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.
In March of this year I wrote an article titled, “We Have Selections, Not Elections. It’s All Just Theater, Dividing Us Over Premade Decisions” – and in that post I quoted Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota, retired Navy SEAL, professional wrestler, and movie star, who summed up political gaggles in America as such. Ventura explained in an interview with Chuck Palahnuik:
“Politics in America is identical to pro wrestling.
“In front of the crowd, in front of TV, they pretend they hate each other. They pretend like they are big adversaries and that’s the sell job they do to us, the citizens. Just like pro wrestling, my job was to go out and piss everybody off so bad they would pay their hard earned money to go out and see me get my butt kicked.
“Well, the point is, we are all friends in the locker room. We all work together. It’s entertainment. We put on a show and this is no different. They are putting on a show, because behind the scenes, they are all friends. They go out to dinner together and cut their deals together. It’s a show. That’s what I believe.
“I taught at Harvard in 2004. Do you know what one of my classes was? How Pro Wrestling Prepares You For Politics.”
Nevertheless, even though many Americans, especially Gen-Z and younger Millennials, are not fans of either candidate, most will still march off to the ballot box this November and vote for the person they hate the least, the so-called “lesser of two evils,” which is still evil; and straight-ticket in a bunch of candidates they know nothing about, and couldn’t be bothered to learn their names, but then have the nerve to complain why they keep getting screwed. You reap what you sow.
Galatians 4:16 Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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Yes during Trump's first POTUS run gas was in the low 2 Dollar range, remember how they used CV-19 as an excuse to Jack those Gas prices sky high.
Big Oil is a Dinosaur Ready to Erupt