How an Obama-appointed judge helped the biden regime *guarantee* higher oil prices years into the future

If you live outside NYC and outside the DC beltway you may have noticed that the price of gasoline is at a record high.

Now what do you suppose is causing that?  If you get your "newz" from the Mainstream Media you probably "know" that it's because Putin invaded Ukraine.  At least that's what Porridgebrain has said *on numerous occasions,* and the Mainstream Media never contradicts their Dear Leader, so you believe it's gotta be true.  Cuz if it was horseshit, the oh-so-honest Mainstrem Media would surely tell ya, right?
 

Typical Dem voter: "Actually it makes sense.  I think we may have been importing ten percent of our oil from Ukraine, and that's now been shut down, making prices rise.  Yeah, dat's it!  Makes perfect sense!"

Except that's horseshit.  We've never imported a single barrel of oil from Ukraine.

Typical Dem voter: "Oh, I got it!  Greedy oil companies!  Yeah, dat's it!"  And of course the Mainstream Media has worked endlessly to blast oil companies as greedy destroyers of our planet, so again, perfectly logical.

Okay, oil companies could conceivably jack up oil prices *in the U.S.*  But oil is traded world-wide, and it's $105 per barrel everywhere.  U.S. companies couldn't make that happen.

So let me show you how things you never heard about--actions taken by the Democrat regime ruling this nation--have killed U.S. energy independence (which we had achieved under Trump, after Obama sneeringly claimed that was impossible) and have set in motion higher oil prices for many years ahead.

On Jan 27th a federal judge in the U.S. district court for the District of Columbia voided $191 million in winning bids for oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

Judge Rudolph Contreras--an Obama appointee--voided all the results of Lease Offering 257, ruling that the Interior Department’s "failure to calculate potential emissions from foreign oil consumption" violated the National Environmental Policy Act.  (How "foreign oil consumption" bears on leases in U.S. waters was not explained.)

Lease Offering 257 was held last November, after the biden regime cancelled the offering normally held in March as part of the Democrats' efforts to make it harder to produce oil in the U.S.

Kristen Monsell, an attorney for one of the groups suing to block federal oil leasing, summarized her group's position this way: “New oil leases are fundamentally incompatible with addressing the climate emergency, and they’ll cause more oil spills and harm to wildlife and people in the Gulf.”
 
The biden regime had initially canceled the lease offering as part of what it soothingly called a "pause" on all oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.  This despite a federal judge having declared that "pausing" leasing violated federal law.  Cuz the regime sneeringly violates any federal law or court order it doesn't want to obey.

Companies cited that ruling to force the regime to hold the lease offering as usual.  

The federal agency in charge of leasing wrote a typically Democrat email explaining why they didn't want to offer oil leases despite that being a federal law:
   “Especially in the face of the climate crisis, we need to take the time to make significant and long overdue programmatic reforms.  That’s why the President called for a pause on leasing in his Executive Order, and why we are appealing the decision enjoining implementation of the pause.”

The courts ordered the regime to comply with federal law ordering leasing on federal lands and waters, and Lease Offering 257 was held last November.

But for leftists nothing is ever over, and "environmental groups" immediately filed suit in the D.C. District Court asking the court--not to block the government from offering to lease offshore waters, since that was required by law--but merely *to prevent the Interior Department from authorizing any development on any such leases.*

Of course that would render the entire exercise pointless, eh?  Which was obviously the point of the lawsuit.  

Judge Rudolph Contreras--an Obama appointee--ruled that the National Environmental Policy Act required the govt to consider the environmental impacts of every decision to offer oil leases on any federal "land."

Contreras voided Offering 257 entirely.  He further sealed the death of offshore drilling by saying he was not giving the federal leasing agency a deadline to complete the "new analysis," instead saying he left that to the regime's discretion.  And since the biden regime has made its opposition to all oil exploration, production and use very clear, rational adults can expect the regime won't complete the required "new analysis" for the remainder of biden's term.

So every barrel of oil that could have been produced from the leases won in offering 257 has now been delayed at least three years.

You'd think a majority of voters would wake up to the fact that Democrats are doing everything they can to cut U.S. oil production and use, under the bullshit claim of "global warming."  But thanks to the Mainstream Media, virtually no Americans will ever hear about any of the regime's sabotage.  Instead the regime will blame cripplingly high oil prices on Putin, or sunspots, or "supply chain issues."  

And the regime's supporters in the Mainstream Media will dutifully echo that bullshit, without a critical word. 

UPDATE:  Yesterday the federal kingdom that runs leasing said it was canceling the "Cook Inlet" lease offering (258).  This morning I finally found the statement from the Interior Department sub-agency, and it turns out that after the communist rat-bastard judge voided offering 257, the regime has used that ruling as its legal cover to cancel offerings 258, 259 and 261, essentially refusing to lease for another 18 months.  So they've now canceled leasing for two full years.

But cunningly--typically--the Interior Department claimed they were canceling the Cook Inlet offering due to "lack of interest from the industry."  Of course this is utter horseshit, because oil companies don't announce their intentions or interest beforehand, since that prompts competitors to increase their bids.  So the regime had no idea whether there would be much interest.  What the regime needed was an excuse that the public would believe, and "lack of interest" is impossible to disprove.

Do you see what's happening yet?  Good Democrats never will, no matter how obvious the regime's plans.