The Sconi

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) is sounding off on what he views as President Joe Biden’s hypocrisy when it comes to the country’s ongoing energy production crisis.

"Biden won't unleash American energy because of environmental concerns,” he recently posted on Twitter. “Yet, he is shipping our oil to China—the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Talk about hypocrisy."

At the same time, reports are the White House recently exported 5 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to countries in Europe and Asia last month. Among other moves, cargoes of SPR crude were sent to the Netherlands and to a Reliance refinery in India. In addition, a third cargo is headed to China; and U.S. Customs data showed the fourth-largest U.S. oil refiner, Phillips 66, shipped approximately 470,000 barrels of sour crude from the Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy.

“All the Gulf states are meeting,” Biden said in a recent news conference in Madrid following a NATO summit, quoted in a Bloomberg report. “I have indicated to them that I thought they should be increasing production. I hope we see them, in their own interest, concluding that makes sense to do.”

In March, the president announced the release of up to 180 million barrels of crude oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) over a six-month period. Biden added that there would be a slight delay in declining gas prices by days or weeks, but the prices would drop by an unknown range.

"It could come down fairly significantly, ” he said. "It could come down [to] a better part of anything from 10 cents to 35 cents a gallon, it’s unknown at this point.”

In Wisconsin, the impact of it all is being felt as much as it is anywhere, with average pump prices as of July 8 at $4.52 per gallon, $1.54 more than this time last year, AAA data showed.

Sometime this month Biden is scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia on a trip that “is poised to be a significant moment for gasoline prices," the Bloomberg report said. The moment is largely slated to be a make-or-break time because "Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the only countries with significant spare capacity to pump crude." Without a pledge from the OPEC members to boost production, the president would reportedly "lose a powerful tool for alleviating the economic and political pain caused by high fuel prices."

Biden has taken action to remove fossil fuels entirely across the country, from killing the Keystone XL pipeline to banning oil and gas leasing on federal land, which had provided approximately one-fifth of the total production in the United States as of 2019; a report issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources said. 

When he entered office in January 2021, one of the early steps Biden took was to sign a series of executive orders that prioritized climate change, a CNBC report said.