One of the world’s leading electric car innovators is calling for more oil drilling “immediately” at this crucial moment in history.
Elon Musk, the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, wrote in a tweet some say was aimed at the Biden administration: “Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”
In a second tweet, the world’s richest man said, “Obviously, this would negatively affect Tesla, but sustainable energy solutions simply cannot react instantaneously to make up for Russian oil & gas exports.”
As CBN News has reported, as the U.S. deploys economic sanctions to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, we continue to indirectly fund the Russian war machine because we’re buying Russian oil at much higher prices.
The U.S. imported 245 million barrels of oil from Russia last year—about 8% of all U.S. oil imports—up from 198 million barrels in 2020. That’s less than the U.S. gets from Canada or Mexico but more than it imported last year from Saudi Arabia.
Now Capitol Hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calling for President Biden to ban Russian oil and natural gas imports as the next step to punish Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.
Some economic analysts believe such action could drive up energy prices in the U.S. even further. But some critics say we wouldn’t be importing so much Russian oil, and prices would be much cheaper too, if Biden hadn’t taken action to slash America’s oil and gas output, like killing the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline soared 45 cents a gallon in the past week and topped $4.06 on Monday, according to auto club AAA. The price of regular gasoline broke $4 a gallon on Sunday for the first time in nearly 14 years and is now up nearly 50% from a year ago.
GasBuddy, which tracks prices down to the service-station level, said Monday that the U.S. was likely to break its record price of $4.10 a gallon, but that does not account for inflation. In today’s terms, the record price would be equal to about $5.24 after accounting for the massive spike in inflation that we’ve also seen in the past year.
But the worst may still be up ahead when it comes to gas prices.
“Forget the $4 per gallon mark, the nation will soon set new all-time record highs and we could push closer to a national average of $4.50,” said GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan. “We’ve never been in this situation before, with this level of uncertainty. … Americans will be feeling the pain of the rise in prices for quite some time.” {eoa}
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