Biden’s ‘massively increased spending’ for green energy: Steve Moore

All right, President Biden is celebrating his a climate agenda on this Earth Day. Any moment now, he will take to the podium in Virginia to announce billions more dollars in grants for solar projects. Let’s bring in our panel senior Trump campaign economic advisor Steve Moore and former Obama economic advisor Robert Wolf. Robert, the last time I checked, all this government spending was causing the historic inflation. So why are we not talking about ways to curb that spending? Well, we definitely should think about ways to curb the spending. I have a great idea. We should get every congressman who has a line item. We should have an up and down vote on passing all that pork we pass. And I think we would actually have these paid for. Steve knows during the Obama administration we had what was called pay fors. You want some money, you go pay for it. Actually, that that actually was removed, therefore after with the Trump administration, and we know they spent about $7 trillion on their tax cuts, so hard to pay for stuff. I’ll let Steve respond to that while also asking you, Steve, why is it that we’re talking about, you know, widening this green energy push at a time where gas prices are clearly going up? And when the administration’s asked what we’re doing to bring them down, they make bonkers statements like this. This is the energy secretary, Gran Jen Granholm on the View on Friday. Listen to lower those prices. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he, we have this big tool called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And he released oil along with convincing our allies around the world to do the same so that we put more supply on the market because what it was all these Russian barrels were pulled up. The president is watching this. He’s obsessed with it to the point where his plan is to tap the emergency reserves to bring gas prices down. Steve. Yeah. By the way, Robert had me there till the very end of what he said. Robert, I’m totally with you on pay for us. We just passed out of the House $100 billion foreign aid bill, and not one penny of it is paid for. And so, Robert, you and I agree on that. And I love your idea about getting rid of the pork by having line item, you know, votes. And I’d like to see a line item veto because we do have an out of control budget. Now, here’s the thing about the green energy. I mean, Biden has massively increased spending on these green energy programs like solar energy, like wind energy, like battery energy. And yes, guess what we’re using, we’re still using record amounts of, of fossil fuels because those are the most efficient forms of energy. And one day Joe Biden saying how, oh, we’re transitioning to green energy. And then the other day you’re saying, oh, we’re producing, you know, record amounts of oil. So which is it? By the way, the worst way to to deal with our high gas prices is to continue to diminish and deplete our strategic petroleum reserve. The best way to do it is to drill, drill, drill, drill. I don’t know what the plan has ever been. I mean, let’s rewind the tape, Robert, to this moment when Jen Granholm early in this administration was asked for the plan to bring prices down. What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America? That is hilarious. Wood that I had the magic wand on this. It’s really just not funny when people, the middle class is getting hit by these high prices. Robert, OK, your your viewers are going to like me. I’m on the other side of what Jennifer Granholm said on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That should only be used in the most desperate situations, similar when Trump used it during COVID, when Biden used it during the supply chain, when Obama used it with the BP oil spill, when Bush used it during the Persian Gulf war. Who’s going to stop that is not to be used because of gas volatility. And so I oppose if that’s what we’re thinking, and I don’t think that’s what the Biden administration is thinking, that because gas prices are up, we should get let the reserves go. I actually, I think it should be for desperate measures during desperate times. Listen, there’s no question geopolitical risk is front and center. We’ve talked about, Steve and I have talked about shouldn’t be, we are, we’re an energy rich nation. We should be able to produce what we consume. The positive and I, I know Steve wants to go, but the positive, we are producing more energy than we’ve ever produced in the history of America. So that’s a positive. That’s a fact. See, so Steve got to respond to that first. First of all, I think we’re having an impact on Robert because he’s sounding very sensible today. So I wish more Democrats sounded like you do, because you’re right, we should not use the Strategic Petroleum reserve to try to, you know, you know, gerrymander what the price is going to be. And by the way, we’re at a basically an all time low already on the strategic reserve. So we’re going to need it if we do have a crisis. But here’s the thing, yes, we are producing a lot of oil right now, but we just did an analysis. We should be producing about 3 or 4 million more a day, Sandra, we could be if we just got back to building the pipelines, the the LNG terminals that we need. We are the most energy rich country in the world. We should be using it. And that would be a good way by the way of taking on our enemies like Russia and Iran. I mean, I recall not too long ago, last administration geopolitics all of a sudden did not move energy markets because we were producing what we were consuming what we needed as a nation. And that has significant particularly changed in just three years. Thanks to both of you. Always appreciate the debate. Thank you.