Gas prices may be at record highs, but don’t expect Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to be answering any questions.
After speaking at a conference in Houston on Wednesday, Granholm dodged Fox News reporters, with her aides physically blocking the journalists from getting too close.
Granholm is the latest administration official to sound an off-note regarding record-high gas prices. There’s no shortage of them, unfortunately — something we’ve been covering here at The Western Journal. You can help our mission to bring readers the truth by subscribing.
The altercation happened when Fox News’ Andrew Murray tried to ask Granholm a few questions after her speech at CERAWeek, an annual conference on energy markets.
“Is there any talk about bringing Iran back to the table because of gas prices?” Murray asked a visibly surprised Granholm.
The energy secretary kept on walking, however — and her press secretary, Charisma Troiano, directed the reporters to address their questions to her.
Another aide blocked a Fox News camera with a folder, because that’s going to make a distant bureaucrat seem more accessible.
The video is below:
“Shortly after Murray identified himself as a journalist with Fox News Digital, another aide placed a folder in his face blocking his cell phone camera,” Fox News reported.
The question Murray directed at Granholm alights on one of the thornier issues President Joe Biden’s administration is dealing with. After banning imports of Russian oil, the United States needs to find somewhere else to get it.
The administration has been open about the fact it doesn’t want oil produced at home. The solution may be to work with pariah states; On March 2, according to Fox, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said “all options are on the table” when MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asked him about buying oil from Iran.
In addition to looking toward Tehran, emissaries from the Biden administration visited Venezuela over the weekend. There was no official announcement as to why U.S. officials were visiting an oil-rich country that’s been the subject of sanctions since a rigged 2018 presidential election and subsequent crackdown on dissent, but one can assume it’s not because Caracas is lovely this time of year.
And then there’s gas prices, which have hit historic highs for the past three days. According to the AAA, the national average price for a gallon of gas was at $4.25 on Wednesday, up from another record of $4.17 a gallon on Tuesday. That gave way to a new record of $4.32 a gallon on Thursday.
“In this moment of crisis we need more supply,” Granholm said during her Wednesday speech. “Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”
Where that supply comes from, however, is another matter. The administration has been adamant that it won’t come from any reversal of policy on its end, whether it involves new energy leases on federal land or giving the green light to projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. While that would be only a medium-term strategy for American energy independence, it’s a more viable path than the green-energy long game the administration is playing.
In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Biden promised his country that “transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices. It will mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as a weapon.”
Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices.
But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices.
It will mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as a weapon.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 9, 2022
Yes, it means you’ll only have to worry about the $50,000-plus price tag on an electric vehicle. Only after we all buy cars that sell for well above the U.S. median income (about $35,000 in 2020, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve) will we be able to pry the fossil-fuel weapon from Putin’s hand.
As for what will actually fuel the power plants that make the electricity to charge up the Teslas the administration is counting on to get us out of our bind, well, let’s think about that later.
In the short term, however, we have to get that oil and gas from somewhere — and those somewheres could be run by tyrants just as bad as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Neither Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei nor Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro has invaded his neighbors recently, although that’s probably from lack of opportunity as opposed to a moral aversion to unnecessary cross-border violence.
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Both tyrants, however, have ruthlessly oppressed their own people for years and don’t seem particularly keen on letting up. So, are we going to be relying on tyrants to tangle with another tyrant — all so the Biden administration can force its green energy agenda down the nation’s throat?
That, in effect, what the Fox News reporters were asking. And, instead of answering, Granholm ran away while her aides physically blocked them. Says it all, doesn’t it?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
