From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Joe Biden and his appointees took an abundance of costly and damaging policy actions during his four-year term in office. Fortunately, that damaging agenda was limited to a single term presidency by voters last November who had grown weary of footing the massive bills for it all in the form of constantly increasing prices for all forms of energy.

Now the task of cleaning it all up and repairing the damage falls to President Donald Trump and his appointees. In another fortunate development for America, the President has chosen an eager and extremely talented array of energy-related appointees, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

One of the costliest actions taken by ex-President Biden related to U.S. national security came when he decided to raid the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by using it as a campaign tool to influence the 2022 mid-term elections. Early that year, Biden invoked a program to rapidly deplete the contents of the SPR, pulling 1 million barrels per day from the underground salt caverns which hold the crude for 180 days in hopes of lowering gas prices at the pump.

In an interview this week with radio host Glenn Beck, Secretary Wright revealed that, by drawing the volumes down so rapidly, Biden caused damage to the integrity of those salt caverns so severe that his Energy Department will now have to spend a big piece of its budget repairing the infrastructure before the caverns can be refilled. “[Biden] flooded the market with oil, reduced the price of oil in the short term but at the cost of U.S. strategic positioning, and they damaged the facilities in the Strategic petroleum reserve by draining them so fast,” Wright told Beck, adding, “We have to spend over $100 million to repair the damage of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that wasn’t built for that.”

For readers who may not be aware, Congress and President Gerald Ford authorized the creation of the SPR in 1975 in the wake of the first Arab Oil Embargo of 1973-74 That embargo caused severe shortages of gasoline, along with price spikes across the United States. Congress intended the SPR as a tool whose careful deployment would enhance and protect national security in times of real emergencies, not one to be used for cynical political purposes.

“It’s for when a very bad day happens,” Wright put it to Beck. “The world literally runs on oil. If you don’t have oil, you’re screwed in everything you do – economics, defense, health care, anything.”

In March, Secretary Wright unveiled an aggressive plan to refill the SPR, estimating the cost of doing so at the $70 per barrel price that prevailed at the time to be about $20 billion. He also estimated it would take 4 to 6 years to complete the process due to the magnitude of Biden’s unwise withdrawals. Filling the reserve is not something that can be done all in a single transaction. Rather, it is a complex process governed by regulations which require DOE to solicit competitive bids for relatively small lots of crude.

“By design, it’s much slower to fill it than to drain it,” Wright told Beck. “It will take us, going flat out, four, five, six years to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We are dead set committed to do it, but we’ve compromised our national security for years to get a little bit of an electoral advantage in 2022.”

It should be noted here that Wright would love to take advantage of current low oil prices, which have dropped to around $60/bbl today. Obviously, the same “buy low, sell high” philosophy followed by smart stock investors applies to buying and selling crude oil, too.

But DOE’s buyback program cannot begin until the damage caused by Biden’s careless disregard for national security has been repaired. Doing that will require months, during which time oil prices could rise or drop significantly.

“Energy is the infrastructure of life,” Wright reminded Beck. “You can’t use it for politics.”

But unfortunately for U.S. national security, Joe Biden did just that. The mess he left behind is Wright’s to clean up.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By James V. F. Dickey and Ivan London

The Trump administration is suing Michigan and Hawaii over their stated plans to sue energy companies for alleged climate change harms. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison should watch out because he’s probably next.

Minnesota’s lawsuit against energy producers is a naked attempt to reshape national energy policy that will have global repercussions for costs. In other words, bad decisions by Minnesota courts will skyrocket prices for consumers everywhere, which is explicitly against the Trump administration’s energy policies.

Ellison’s lawsuit claims that energy production that results in burning gasoline and natural gas has caused global climate change. Yet Ellison’s beef with the companies isn’t about harm from climate change but what energy producers supposedly have said or not said to the public about the energy they produce for our nation. He also faults these companies for having funded research by organizations that disagreed with the State’s view of the climate science.

It’s part of a larger coordinated effort to use litigation to lay the groundwork for an economy-wide green energy transition and to secure additional income for state budgets. Democratic prosecutors in nine states, more than a dozen cities and counties, and Washington, D.C. have brought similar cases using the same playbook to try to keep the deliberations in state courts. In Puerto Rico, “similar” turned out to be identical, as Judge Aida Delgado-Colon discovered when large blocks of text in a complaint filed on behalf of San Juan matched word-for-word a different lawsuit by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities the year before.

Climate activists found Ellison a willing partner for persecuting energy companies when they sold him on the idea of getting millions of dollars a year for Minnesota by securing a settlement like the tobacco master settlement agreement but with energy companies as the target.

Attorney General Ellison has admitted that Minnesota’s special assistant attorneys general were paid for by the New York University School of Law’s climate-alarmist group, the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. The purpose of that funding is to advance “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions,” said then-executive director David J. Hayes. If this troubles you, you’re on to something: just imagine the reaction if an immigration-hawk group paid staffers’ salaries at the Minnesota attorney general’s office to coordinate deportations with ICE.

Minnesota’s demand in the lawsuit is mind-boggling: a gag order on energy producers’ speech, a forced “public education campaign” about supposed climate change myths, and an order for the energy companies “to disgorge all profits” because of their speech. The last bit is the kicker: Minnesota’s case is really just a virtue-signaling cash grab dressed in legalese.

If the case continues, Minnesotans will reap the whirlwind sown by their attorney general in the form of unreliable sources of energy, a crippled economy and astronomically high prices for travel and home-heating. Every state in the union would reel from this economic disaster’s ripple effect, which is why 19 states asked the Supreme Court this year to halt these lawsuits by Minnesota and four other states.

Minnesota should not try to set the entire country’s climate policy. Only Congress—where Minnesota and other states have elected representatives representing their interests—can do that. Minnesota’s appellate courts should end this charade—though they have so far balked.

Lawsuits like this one have already been rejected by courts in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey and partially dismissed in Delaware. For the sake of every American, Minnesota judges must follow suit and let federal courts litigate the issues that affect the entire nation. If they don’t, they should expect the Trump administration to come knocking.

James V. F. Dickey is managing attorney for the Upper Midwest Law Center and Ivan London is a senior attorney at the Mountain States Legal Foundation.