Letter: Drill baby drill
The Trump and Biden stimulus programs had an unintended consequence. Mainly high inflation that took years to curb. The inflation occurred on the Biden watch and democrats paid the price. When will our leaders learn they cannot control market forces. Trump has already back peddled on his promise to lower grocery prices. But he continues to proclaim his ability to create prosperity by unleashing the energy sector.
Very few Americans understand our energy economics. For example there are over 6,000 leases that have been let with no oil companies showing up to drill. I seriously doubt that oil companies want to see prices drop. I’m sure these companies would be glad to sell to Europe rather than reduce prices to Americans.
Being an oil exporter is fairly recent for the U.S. However, the oil we produce we can’t refine. Our 50 year old refineries are designed to process heavy sour crude. We import this from Canada and sell our light sweet crude to Europe. Putting tariffs on Canada is lunacy.
Protecting legacy auto makers will be difficult at best. A return to the good old days of internal combustion engines is like going back to 45 records. Electric vehicles are taking over, especially in China which was a previously large purchaser of oil. China has made a huge long term investment in EV’s. The enormous capacity that China has is a great threat to legacy auto makers in the US, Europe and Japan.
The only bright spot I see is natural gas. We have a lot of natural gas and we can send it in liquid form to Europe. The Biden administration has restricted this product which will now likely be set free.
Lynn Wood
Ogden