Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) alleged that the Biden administration is creating the conditions for high gas prices to push Americans into adopting green energy technology such as electric cars.
Cotton told Breitbart in an interview published Sunday that “it’s not unintended or some accident” that gas prices are rising across the country. Since his first day in office, President Joe Biden has taken steps to tamp down on future oil and gas production in the United States by restricting lease sales and shutting down pipeline projects.
“Most notably, more and more people tell me that they’re not even able to fill their pickup truck tank up for the entire week,” Cotton said. “They’ve got to fill up half a tank and hope that the price comes down by the end of the week. That, in particular, is the intended effect of Joe Biden’s energy policy. It’s not unintended or some accident. They want gas to cost $4 a gallon because they want all of us to get out of pickup trucks and SUVs and get into small electric compacts or bicycles or scooters or whatever else Pete Buttigieg takes to work.”
Cotton stressed that high fuel prices along with historically high rates of inflation are hitting Americans’ pocketbooks hard.
“You cannot print trillions of dollars in money on the one hand and also pay people not to work and not to produce the stuff that we need to buy and on the other hand not expect the price to increase as fast as it has in 30 years,” Cotton said. “At this rate, people are losing a penny on every dollar of their savings every month. So in three months, if you had $100 in your savings account, it’ll be worth only $97 in just three months. That is going to continue to worsen as long as the Democrats pursue their reckless inflationary policies. I heard it today; I hear it all across Arkansas. People can’t find the turkeys and the fixings for Thanksgiving. If they can, they can barely afford it. They can’t find Christmas gifts for the kids. If they can, they have to cut back the number of presents they buy.”
Biden has made cutting down carbon emissions a central part in his energy policy. He has scrapped oil infrastructure projects such as the Keystone Pipeline that would have carried crude oil from Canada to refineries in the United States. He has also suspended potential oil lease sales in 1002 Area oil reserve of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Biden moved the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, a non-binding set of international climate goals, in January. Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accords last year, citing an unfair burden the accords placed on Americans versus other countries.
In October, Biden faced questions on rising gas prices during a CNN Town Hall event. Biden admitted that he did not have a “near-term answer.”
“I must tell you; I don’t have a near-term answer,” Biden said. “There’s two things I could do: I could go in the petroleum reserve and take out and probably reluce [sic] — reduce the price of gas maybe 18 cents or so a gallon. It’s still going to be above three bucks. And one of the things that I refuse to have happen, because I didn’t want anybody — I made a commitment: If you pass the stuff I’m talking about, not — not one single penny in tax would go against anybody making less than 400 grand.”
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Source: Dailywire
