Weren't the price increases under Biden driven primarily by the Ukraine war and the removal of Russian supply from the market?
On his first day in office, Biden officially killed the Keystone Pipeline, and he issued *Executive Order 14008, which among other idiocy, officially halted all new oil and natural gas leasing on Federal lands.
Biden also cut BLM drilling leases by 50% within the US interior, canceled drilling leases in the ANW Refuge, added extraction restrictions on 13 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve, canceled lease sales in the Gulf of America, and so on.
And about a week before leaving office in 2025, Biden issued another order permanently banning offshore oil and gas development along the entire East and West Coasts, and large areas of the Alaskan coast; the largest such ban in history.
Obama did a similar trick in 2016; immediately before leaving office, Obama issued Executive Order 13754 withdrawing large portions of the Alaskan OCS from further leasing. Upon entering office, Trump issued his own order revoking E.O. 13754 in its entirety. Environmental groups promptly sued challenging the revocation. The resulting court case has created some annoying precedent:
In League of Conservation Voters v. Trump, the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska provided the most detailed judicial analysis to date of presidential authority under OCSLA Section 12(a). The court invalidated a portion of then-President Trump's E.O. 13795, which had attempted to reverse Obama-era withdrawals of areas in federal waters off Alaska's northern coast from oil and gas leasing. Though the court's decision was ultimately vacated as moot by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after President Biden reinstated the Obama withdrawals in E.O. 13990, the district court's reasoning – that Section 12(a) explicitly grants presidents the authority to withdraw areas from drilling but does not include the power to revoke prior withdrawals – provides a guide for how the issue may play out again in the future, should President-Elect Trump in his second term attempt to revoke the recent Biden Administration withdrawals, or even those under E.O. 13990 that reinstated the prior Obama Administration withdrawals.
Basically, it was felt that Trump couldn't just rescind Biden's ban with his own Executive Order but that an Act of Congress was required, because of how it is worded. Thankfully, last October a Federal Judge ruled that Biden's ban was unconstitutional due to Biden's clear intent to make the ban permanent and control the hand of future Presidents.
Anyway, my point is that the Ukraine War might have given Biden an excuse for his rising energy prices, but the reality is that he was actively trying to raise gas and electricity prices from his first day in office.
The Russian oil supply hasn't been removed from the global market anyway, and actually export volume increased 5-10% from 2022 onward, and has been sold at a discounted price which would actually lower global oil price averages.
