Bice continues to shill for Big Oil while trying to shake down feds

As she settles into her second time period representing Oklahoma’s fifth Congressional District’s hottest petroleum stars, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice is doing her greatest for Oklahoma vitality firm house owners and nearly nothing for anybody who will not be trying to pull black gunk out of the earth. 

Much of her work this previous week was spent as a tireless handmaid for legacy vitality income. On Jan. 26, Bice spoke in favor of H.R. 21, a invoice that may vastly broaden the quantity of federal lands which might be opened for petroleum extraction. 

“Since President Biden took office, he has waged a full-on assault on the oil and gas industry,” Bice mentioned. “Instead of unleashing American energy production, he has unleashed our energy reserves. The Strategic Petroleum Level is at its lowest in 40 years. President Biden has abused the SPR, which is supposed to be used for emergency purposes, and weakened America’s energy security. The people of Oklahoma and all Americans deserve more.”

As common readers may recall, the invoice is a little bit of gassy nastiness that dovetails with Bice’s lately reintroduced SAVE Act, H.R. 59, which I wrote about final week. H.R. 59’s aim is to shut off gross sales of Strategic Petroleum Reserve SPR holdings to firms which might be owned by state sponsors of terrorism like China, which former President Donald Trump hates, however not like Saudi Arabia, which Trump likes rather a lot. 

But H.R. 21 is a direct money seize for the petroleum trade that takes away coverage making energy from the Department of Energy and, as a bonus for Bice, it’s horrible for the atmosphere. It goes like this: if the Department of Energy desires to launch barrels from the SPR, it should agree to an equal proportion of federal land being opened for oil and fuel exploration. 

I do know I’m spending a whole lot of time on SPR, however how Bice and the Republican Party are lining up on this situation says rather a lot about how they hope to plunder federal lands and provides their loudest and wealthiest constituency an enormous windfall. 

Now, Bice is arguing that the SPR is at its lowest stage in 40 years, and he or she is right. The present quantity is 398.56 billion barrels. If all oil imports ceased, in accordance to an October 2022 story in Bloomberg, the U.S. would have two years price of oil to offset a large, concerted embargo through which the whole world stopped promoting us oil. 

When Bice talks about “unleashing American energy production,” she doesn’t point out how lengthy the leash is that the federal authorities has on vitality firms, or that the leash solely stops wanting protected federal lands. 

As authored by U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, R-Washington, HR actually mandates that “the Secretary may not execute the first drawdown of petroleum products in the Reserve after the date of enactment of this subsection, whether through sale, exchange, or loan, until the Secretary has developed a plan to increase the percentage of Federal lands (including submerged lands of the Outer Continental Shelf) under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of Defense leased for oil and gas production by the same percentage as the percentage of petroleum in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that is to be drawn down in that first and subsequent drawdowns.”

Bice is actively collaborating in a shakedown of the federal authorities. By requiring federal protected lands to be opened for oil exploration any time a president deems it crucial to shield the home oil provide, the invoice severely undermines the ability of the presidency, places it within the palms of oil firm CEOs and destroys the atmosphere for future generations. 

In Bice’s worldview, that’s a good commerce.

George Lang has labored as an award-winning skilled journalist in Oklahoma City for over 25 years and is the skilled opinion columnist for Free Press. His work has been printed in numerous native publications protecting a variety of topics together with politics, media, leisure and others. George lives in Oklahoma City together with his spouse and son.