Biden obsessed over gas prices. It sometimes seemed that Biden couldn’t go through a meeting without asking about the price at the pump. He asked that a report on gas prices be included in the binder that he took home with him every evening to peruse.
He was convinced that the fossil fuel industry was using the war in Russia as a pretext for profiteering—and because the oil companies had every incentive to restore Republican majorities in Congress, some of his aides were convinced that they were going to screw Biden by keeping prices high.
Even if his energy policy intended to wean America from fossil fuels, he wasn’t going to let that policy objective get in the way of his party’s political survival, or of blunting inflation’s toll on the consumer. He kept ordering oil released from the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down prices. Indeed, each time he added a fresh batch of oil to the world’s supply, the cost of the commodity dropped. Over the months, after he released 180 million barrels of oil, the reserve dwindled to its lowest levels since the 1980s.
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