Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen.
As gas prices continue to rise, Big Oil wants you to blame Joe Biden.
Opining on Fox Business Network, energy industry analyst Phil Flynn claimed the Biden administration is “using cancel culture policies against the U.S. energy industry” and starving the market of domestic petroleum production. Other conservative commentators are attacking the Biden administration’s supposed “war on oil.”
The industry’s biggest lobbying arm, the American Petroleum Institute, is doing its best to tie the price of gasoline to Biden administration policies that aim to mitigate climate change. Large gas and oil producers were behind a social media marketing campaign last fall promoting fossil fuels, while conservative TikTok users encouraged each other to place stickers on gas pumps with Biden pointing to the price per gallon and saying, “I did that.”
This is a highly misleading narrative propagated by an industry scrambling to draw attention away from its record profits while capitalizing... Read more