“Trump’s oil and gas donors don’t really want ‘drill, baby, drill.'” This is how U.S. oil and gas producers are thinking about energy policy in November This is the headline of a news article in the Wall Street Journal on the 22nd.
This heading is not completely misleading. Because, the article goes on, oil and gas producers are nervous about overproducing oil for the obvious reason that prices will fall. Competitors rarely like competition.
However, it is the subheadings that can easily lead to misunderstandings. It says, “The fossil fuel bigwigs helped the president-elect return to Washington. They are now trying to lock in the use of their products for years to come.”
Wow, I thought. Are they trying to force people to use oil and natural gas? That would be terrible.
Actually not. What they’re actually trying to do, according to the story’s authors, Benoît Moreenne and Colin Eaton, is to force the U.S. government to unblock the use of energy that isn’t produced directly from oil or natural gas. It is said that it is a thing. Morene and Eaton write in the third paragraph:
They promote policies that lock in the use of fossil fuels, such as making it easier to permit pipelines and terminals to transport fossil fuels to new markets. They also favor repealing a Biden administration policy aimed at putting more electric vehicles on the roads.
Certainly, making it easier for pipelines and terminals to exist makes it easier to sell more fuel. But notice the second sentence where they accept my point. They want to eliminate Biden’s plan to put “more electric vehicles on the road.”
And what are those policies? Morene and Eaton won’t tell you.
I’ll tell you. The policy they want to abolish is mandating the production of electric cars and subsidies for those who buy them. In other words, Biden has EV lock-in and wants to end that lock-in.
But that doesn’t fit the story at all, does it?
I mentioned above that headlines, unlike subheadings, are not completely misleading. But that’s somewhat misleading.
Morenes and Eaton write:
President Trump has vowed to impose tariffs on trading partners, and some in the energy industry worry that this will affect the price of steel, a critical component in building wells.
If more expensive steel were used, fewer wells would be constructed. This means they produce less oil and natural gas than they would otherwise. Do Morenes and Eaton understand that these oil producers’ concerns are evidence that at least some oil producers want to produce more? Apparently not. .
