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Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor today to talk about the need for more American energy.

On Thursday, President Biden announced that he is going to release even more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. To me, this is another desperate Hail Mary pass. It is a short-term effort to deal with their midterm election crisis. It is a crisis that has been created by the policies of this administration.

The real crisis is the cost-of-living crisis, and it is a crisis that is punishing American families. Inflation is at a 40-year high. Gas prices recently hit the highest price ever. Why is it happening? It is economics 101. The supply of energy is not keeping up with the demand for energy.

We are now producing about 1.3 million barrels of oil per day fewer-- less--than we were in 2019. Yet, for the last 14 months that Joe Biden has been in the White House, he has done absolutely nothing to increase the supply of American energy. He has not sold one lease to produce energy on public lands--not one. President Obama, at this time into his first term, had already held 47 Federal lease sales--in his first 14 months in office. For Joe Biden, the number is still zero.

This just shows that when it comes to energy, Joe Biden is to the far, far left of any previous American President. Joe Biden is already the most anti-American energy President we have ever had. He refuses to do any of the things that would actually help our country in terms of our energy needs. He won't increase oil production by a single drop. No. He wants to release some from the strategic reserve but not actually produce any more American energy.

What he is essentially doing is burning through our savings account. This is now the third time that President Biden has released energy from the strategic reserve. He is on pace to burn through a third of our oil savings in less than 2 years in office. Soon, we are going to have the smallest amount in our reserve, the smallest amount in our savings account, since 1984.

In November, Joe Biden conducted the largest release in history from the strategic reserve. He released 50 million barrels. So what was the result? He made a big announcement of it. The Secretary of Energy did as well. The price of gas went down by 2 cents--2 cents. The White House was so proud of itself that they actually sent out a press release congratulating themselves. Prices went back up almost immediately. The result was an utter failure. So now Joe Biden said he is going to release 180 million barrels over the next 6 months, which is a million barrels a day for the next 180 days--in other words, between now and right before the elections.

The strategic reserve is meant for emergencies. It is not meant for the cynical, political coverup of what the President has done to our American energy policy. Some people call it an election-year gimmick. I call it dangerous--dangerous because we are going to be less prepared for emergencies and be less secure as a nation. We will be less safe.

Now, 180 million barrels sounds like a lot. It is about the amount we use on an average of 9 or 10 days. We use about 20 million barrels a day in the United States. We are currently importing a lot more than that.

Even the President admits that it won't have a big impact, but he doesn't know what else to do. On Thursday, he said this would reduce prices by as little as 10 cents a gallon. We are still over $4 a gallon nationwide in terms of the national average. I expect it is going to remain that high, over $4 a gallon, through the summer.

So who do the American people blame for this? Well, in poll after poll, they blame Joe Biden because he is the one who proudly stood there and beat his chest and said: I have killed the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The day Joe Biden took office, gasoline was $2.38 a gallon. America was energy independent for the first time in 70 years. We were energy dominant. We were exporting energy. We were selling it to our friends instead of having to buy it from our enemies. Joe Biden took office and started attacking American energy, and things have deteriorated ever since.

That is why it is no surprise that energy and gas prices were up 13 out of the last 14 months. By the time Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the average price of a gallon of gas had gone up from $2.38 gallon to $3.53 a gallon. So it was already up over $1.15 a gallon in just over that first year in office for President Biden. Today, the average price of a gallon of gas is about $4.18.

Prices may actually go higher if Joe Biden gets his way in terms of energy policy. That is because, when the President put out his budget, we found he wants to raise taxes on American energy. The budget that the President has proposed for the next year contains 36 new taxes, and 11 of them are directly on American energy. It would cost about $45 billion, which, of course, would be carried on to the people who buy American energy. It would be paid by working families in the form of higher gas prices, higher oil bills. It would cost more to heat your home.

Even Nancy Pelosi, when she looked at the budget, said:

Consumers pay for that.

On Thursday, Joe Biden asked Congress to charge fees on oil and gas leases that aren't even being used. Now, this is another gimmick. People want to use those leases, but the administration is blocking the permission to drill to use the leases. This is just a continuation of the Biden blame game.

If you want to explore for energy in America, the lease is just the first step, the first of many. You need to apply for a permit to drill. In Wyoming, people know all about this. They call it an APD, an application for the permission to drill. You have to pay to apply after you have paid the rent on the lease.

So you apply, and somebody has to make a decision. Those decisions used to be made at the local level. Not anymore. Now the Biden administration has said: We know better than any of you people out around the country. We will make all of the decisions out of Washington.

The decision they have made is they are not going to give any of these permits to drill. That is why the President could say: They are not drilling.

Well, you are not letting people drill.

Now, we are not talking about a couple of leases; we are talking about thousands and thousands--over 4,000 leases--that are tied up that way.

We have another group of leases that is tied up by environmental activists who love to sue to stop energy exploration. They want to keep it in the ground.

So companies are paying their rental fees. They want to explore for energy, but they are being blocked by the administration. Then they are being blamed by that same administration for not exploring for energy.

The President says: Use it or lose it.

Well, that is the law of the land right now. If it doesn't produce oil or gas within 10 years, you actually lose the permit. He doesn't want to explain that to folks.

If the lease does produce energy, if it does produce oil, then the government actually reaps the benefits from that. They get tax money from that. That helps to pay for many of the things that we do as a government. In Wyoming, in our State areas, we use it to help with paying for education, with paying for healthcare. These are vital services in the community that are paid for by the successful exploration and recovery of energy that is currently underground and that Joe Biden wants to keep underground.

In the President's budget, he wants to charge an additional fee on top of all of this. So he refuses to let them drill, and he wants to charge them for not drilling. This is something out of ``Alice in Wonderland.'' More fees will mean producing less. We need to produce more. That is the way to get down the price at the pump--to produce more American energy.

Democrats refuse to admit that the percentage of leases that are actually being used today has never been higher. These are old leases. The Democrats' excuses on this issue are what I would put in the category of the Big Lie--the Big Lie to support an anti-American energy agenda. It is an agenda of less American energy, more taxes, and higher prices. It is the reason millions of American families today are struggling to get by. They are feeling the pain.

According to one estimate from economists at Bloomberg, American families will spend an extra $5,200 this year--that is $100 a week-- compared to last year, just to stay even. It is all due to inflation in the cost of groceries, the cost of gas, the cost of goods. All of those things are squeezing American families. People are getting crushed. Their dreams are being crushed. Potential savings to send kids to college--that is going away. The savings for a vacation--that is going away. You have to empty your wallet to fill your tank under Joe Biden's energy policies, and the extra $100 a week is on top of last year's inflation whereby people across the country said they were paying more and more to get less and less and that even if they got a raise, they couldn't keep up. They have kept falling further and further behind.

People across the country are already living paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford more price increases. They need real solutions, and they are not getting them from this White House. The answer seems pretty simple: Stop the reckless spending here in Washington. Unleash American energy.

President Biden needs to do a couple of things right away to unleash American energy.

The first is to have a long-term commitment to produce more American energy. Energy companies aren't going to invest if they think Joe Biden is going to shut them down tomorrow, and in a recent speech, he said that is what his goal is. He wants them to produce more today so he can shut them down tomorrow.

He does need to open up our Federal lands. We should auction off leases right away, and Joe Biden should approve those 4,600 drilling permits, which, today, are still stuck in limbo. He put them there and locked them in.

It takes months to get production up and running. You have to get the right permits. You have to tap the pipelines. You have to speed up the process for pipelines as well. Although we did see the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission--all of the Commissioners--come to the Energy Committee, they don't seem to be very interested--at least the ones in the majority don't seem to be very interested--in speeding up the pipeline process or in allowing pipelines at all.

Finally, Joe Biden needs to stop attacking the hard-working men and women of this country who continue to produce energy, who go to work every day to keep the lights on and to keep us warm in winter. We need these workers out there, and Joe Biden needs to stop attacking them on a daily basis. They are the ones who can get us out of the crisis. They are the ones we need for the economic recovery.

Instead of spending our savings, it is time to unleash American energy. We need more American energy, and we need it now.

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