In Senate, a Clash on What’s Causing Energy Prices to Spike

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Senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s Energy Subcommittee heard testimony July 13 on the drivers of high energy prices, a key issue for Americans across the country as inflation rages and November midterms loom closer.

In May of this year, Rasmussen Reports found that 82 percent of likely voters in the United States considered themselves concerned about increasing gasoline and energy costs. Fully 60 percent rated themselves “very concerned.”

The same poll found that half of likely voters think catastrophic impacts from climate change are probable over the coming century.

“Our reliance on fossil fuels even when we produce it here means we will be stuck paying the prices set in the global market, subject to OPEC and affiliate producers like Russia,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who chairs the subcommittee, in her opening testimony.

Yet, in his own opening testimony, Subcommittee Ranking Member Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said that “President Biden’s Green New Deal policies” were helping to drive up gas prices, citing the administration’s moratorium on onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing.

After missing its latest deadline to issue a legally required five-year leasing plan for those sites, the Interior Department released a draft plan on July 1.

It includes “no more than ten potential lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and an option for one potential lease sale in the northern portion of the Cook Inlet of Alaska.”

An oil and gas attorney recently described the administration’s approach as a “de facto moratorium” on offshore leasing to Bloomberg.

A man pumps gas in Irvine, Calif., on April 1, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times) Divergent Perspectives

Experts at the July 13 hearing had divergent perspectives on the causes and means of addressing high energy

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