President Joe Biden was warned that his Day One decision to throttle the Keystone XL Pipeline project would come back to haunt Americans, one former worker on the project noted this week.
The Biden administration has sought to blame the recent spike in gasoline prices solely on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, federal Energy Information Administration numbers show that the average price of gas in America rose from $2.284 in December 2020, the last full month of the Trump administration, to $3.611 last month — a 58 percent increase.
“It has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine,” former Keystone XL worker Neal Crabtree told Fox News.
“We tried to warn this administration back when they canceled the Keystone Pipeline” that Biden was “canceling national security, foreign policy, and energy.”
“They all kind of go hand-in-hand,” he said.
Former Keystone Pipeline worker says US energy crisis is result of Biden’s policies: ‘We tried to warn you’https://t.co/tTEvpa1FYl
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 9, 2022
Crabtree noted that long before Russia attacked Ukraine, gas prices had been climbing. At one point in November, the increases created so much political noise that Biden released oil from the Strategic Reserve, saying that could tamp down prices.
“Even if we can fix the Ukrainian problem, the prices are still going up,” he said.
Biden’s “policies have everything to do with the rising fuel prices in this country today,” Crabtree said.
Although the pipeline was still in the construction stage, it was a shot across the bow of the energy sector.
“There’s no energy company [that’s] going to spend the money to develop a new lease if they can’t build a pipeline to move the project,” he said.
Crabtree said America has the capacity to fix the problem.
“When I’d first seen the reports of the president going to places like Iran and Venezuela to ask for more oil output, I said, ‘This is fake news, he hasn’t gone this far off the rocker,'” he said. “But I guess that’s the path they want to take.”
In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends First,” Crabtree was not optimistic that the situation will improve.
“The thing about the Keystone is the workforce is ready to go. We can build this thing,” he said. “We can have this thing up and going in about eight months.”
“As long as Biden is using this policy of any-way-but-an-American-way, we’re in for some deep trouble,” he said.
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The alarm had been sounded in 2021 when Biden stopped construction of the pipeline.
Robin Rorick, vice president of midstream and industry operations at the American Petroleum Institute, called the decision. “a blow to U.S. energy security,” according to CNN.
The Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma’s Brook Simmons called Biden’s action “the first blow to the North American energy security paradigm we have been building,” according to the Oklahoman
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.