President Joe Biden is keeping quiet on one of his biggest potential bragging rights, the rise in domestic energy production.
It might seem like a head-scratching approach to reelection, with the bulk of polls showing Biden losing in swing states to his November rival, former President Donald Trump. But the paradox reflects deep sensitivities within Biden’s Democratic coalition, for whom climate change is a top problem, and the use of renewable energy, not old-fashioned fossil fuels, is the coin of the realm.
Biden’s silence on his administration’s energy record is also a tacit gift to Republicans who have worked hard to paint the president as low-energy. Not just as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” but literally as a leader who is gutting the United States’s energy production.
Whether Biden wants to discuss energy issues or not, summer won’t give much choice. He is already struggling to communicate the reality that on his watch, crime is down and the economy is improving despite persistent inflation running above the Federal Reserve’s desired 2% target. Yet as summer travelers get ready to hit the road in a couple of months, gas prices are set to climb back up slowly. Overall, gas prices are up roughly 48% since Biden took office in January 2021.
Other energy prices are up too, including electricity per kilowatt hour and piped gas. And that is with record oil and gas production and exports.
Which is where the problem for both Biden and Republicans comes in.
Silence on Energy is Mutually Beneficial
The president is loath to point out record liquified natural gas production and exports. And Republicans aren’t keen on talking about it and handing Biden a talking point either, six months out-plus from Election Day, when the Democratic president will face off against Trump, his vanquished 2020 rival.
Besides not wanting to anger the greenest section of voters, Biden might also be avoiding talking about energy production because the leaps in output aren’t necessarily his achievements to brag about. While he has focused on scaling back exploration and putting holds on oil and gas leases, the Trump administration made a concerted effort to free up drilling and exploration.
“Energy production is a latency issue,” Competitive Enterprise Institute research fellow Paige Lambermont told the Washington Examiner. “The regulations that we make today, or last year, don’t affect, largely, the production that we see right now.”
“We’re not seeing approvals under Joe Biden delivering gas and oil, largely,” she said. “We’re seeing previous-era investment.”
Investment in energy is something Biden is familiar with. He ran on promises of spending big on transitioning the country to green energy and has spent billions of dollars, and promised billions more, on ramping up renewable energy.
The Inflation Reduction Act was enacted in 2022 with a clean energy price tag of $369 billion, a figure that, a year later, had ballooned.
During the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration spent $110 billion on wind and solar manufacturing and allocated $12.5 billion on extending and expanding the electric vehicle tax credit program.
Biden’s most recent budget request, clocking in at $7.3 trillion, included $51 billion for the Department of Energy. That top line would help cover a range of programs and costs, including $1.6 billion to support clean energy jobs and infrastructure projects, $11 billion for international climate finance, and $142 million to deploy clean energy on federal lands.
Paired with that spending has been a raft of restrictions.
Shortly after taking office, Biden put a moratorium on oil and gas leases and recently paused liquefied natural gas exports, a move that spooked European allies.
“Along with energy production and energy prices, the reliable delivery of energy is really important,” Lambermont said. “One of the most important things is obviously pipeline approvals. Making sure that the continued movement of energy around the country is manageable as we need it is so crucial to maintaining enough natural gas for the electric grid and to keeping the oil flowing.”
Biden’s mixed bag on energy production has contributed to what some are calling an “all of the above” policy that, instead of making all sides a little happy with their half-loaf, has frustrated everyone.
“We are an ‘all of the above’ country in many ways,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) told Politico. “But is that sufficient? Ultimately we’re going to have to figure out how we get to a clean energy future.”
Biden’s reticence drew the attention of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a frequent critic of the president on a range of issues, including on energy, as his home state of West Virginia relies heavily on coal production — something Democrats are anxious to phase out. Manchin heaped tongue-in-cheek praise on the president last month, lauding the all-of-the-above strategy and encouraging Biden to talk about it more.
“You won’t hear about our historic energy production on TV, on social media, at Democratic campaign events — or from many administration aides,” he wrote in an op-ed. “As a result of these bills, there has never been a better time to invest in American energy.”
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Pressure on Biden to have an answer for why prices are continuing to go up despite bountiful production will grow as the November election approaches. And whether or not he continues to force companies to dip further into current reserves or make new pipelines and transportation more difficult to build, prices are likely to keep going up.
“The big thing for Joe Biden is that he wants to simultaneously take credit for any economic goods that are happening under his presidency while also appearing to do transformational change in the name of fixing things for climate,” Lambermont said. “And so he doesn’t want to admit there’s high energy production right now because he doesn’t think it’s good.”