‘Height of Hypocrisy and Bad Policy’: Biden Gets Hammered Over Greenlighting Oil Drilling Abroad, Killing It at Home

Even progressives should see the hypocrisy.

The same president who used his first day in office to declare war on U.S. energy production just gave the greenlight to an American company to drill for 🛢️Oil in the socialist hellhole of 🇻🇪Venezuela, claiming it marks a step toward the “restoration of democracy” in the South American country.

It’s more like it marks a restoration of billions to Chevron Corp. and a windfall for dictator Nicolas Maduro.

“This will only embolden and enrich 🇻🇪Venezuela’s communist dictator,” former Secretary of State 👤Mike Pompeo wrote in a Twitter post published Monday.

“Biden’s decision to allow Chevron to resume its operations in Maduro’s 🇻🇪Venezuela – while draining America’s strategic reserves for political gain and crushing our domestic energy industry – is the height of hypocrisy and bad policy.”

As The Associated Press reported Saturday, the approval is ostensibly linked to the progress of talks in Mexico City between the Maduro regime and the opposition “Unitary Platform”

The move marks a slight easing of U.S. sanctions against 🇻🇪Venezuela that have been in place for more than 15 years. They started as a way to try to pressure Caracas to cooperate on efforts to fight war and terrorism, according to the Congressional Research Service, but were stiffened in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump to support opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

There’s a reason it’s tough to see how the move, announced in a Treasury Department news release on Saturday, will benefit the American people — or the Venezuelan people for that matter.

Profits from the drilling “would be directed to paying down debt owed to Chevron” rather than the Venezuelan state-run 🛢️Oil company PDVSA, according to the AP.

But considering 🇻🇪Venezuela is effectively a gangster state, the idea that at a good percentage of the money generated by the drilling won’t end up sticking to the government’s socialist fingers is ludicrous.

And given the tiny percentage of U.S. 🛢️Oil needs the Venezuelan drilling would meet — about 1 percent, according to a Reuters commentary piece by veteran tech writer Robert Cyran — it won’t help motorists at the pump much at all. However, since Chevron is owed about $4 billion from its 🇻🇪Venezuela project, according to Cyran, it could help the company plenty.

It’s clearly no coincidence that the policy was announced on the Saturday of the long Thanksgiving weekend, when most Americans had other things on their minds besides their president’s determination to make daily living as expensive as possible while chasing the chimera of a “clean energy” future.

But plenty of Republicans and conservatives were paying attention.

President 👤Joe Biden has made no secret of his administration’s antipathy to fossil fuels. His Day One executive order on Jan. 20, 2021, destroying the Keystone XL pipeline — and thousands of American jobs — made it clear from the outset that his time in office was going to be controlled by the climate change fanatics who detest the motors that have powered world prosperity since the Industrial Revolution.

His record since, when it comes to drilling, hasn’t improved.

Biden has catered to the beliefs of the Church of Green Energy, raising the prices of gasoline at the pumps and home heating for American citizens to pander to progressive voters that helped power his still-unbelievable victory in the 2020 election.

But now his administration has approved 🛢️Oil drilling in a country run by a socialist kleptocracy so inept that its own citizens are fleeing in droves for the United States.

As some commentators pointed out, Biden might well have been constrained from engaging with the Maduro dictatorship for fear of offending Venezuelan-Americans whose knowledge of socialism is a little more personal than that of the average Ivy League student or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fan.

But after the Democrats’ blowout defeat in November in Florida, home of the largest Venezuelan population in the U.S., Biden and his administration probably realized they had nothing to lose by getting chummy with the leftists in Caracas.

If the Biden crowd thinks that this deal is going to buy friendship with the Maduro regime — with its close ties to the mullahs of Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the communist dictatorship of China — it’s even more ineptly naive than conservatives imagine.

So, under the pretense of fostering a “restoration of democracy,” the administration has approved an American company drilling for 🛢️Oil while using its powers to destroy the production that under the presidency of Donald Trump made the dream of energy independence achievable in the United States only a few short years ago.

It’s the kind of hypocrisy even progressives could see through — if they wanted to.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.