MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tweets Lies About Domestic Oil Production – Opinion

Since I was absent from the blog for the last several months, my research has focused on how the left is able to say statements that are so inaccurate, a quick Google search will show them as lying rubbish, and they don’t face any consequences.  With the Biden Economy turning out to be precisely what everyone predicted, Democrats, and media, (but I repeat myself), have been spreading lies about the economic direction.

The latest offender of this was MSNBC’s own Chris Hayes, as he replied to a tweet from Chuck Grassley, in which Grassley blames the Biden Administration for current fuel prices due to the Administration’s actions on domestic oil production.

American Energy has been declared war by President Biden through his failure policies. There is no XL pipe, no leasing on Fed lands and no offshore drilling.

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) June 14, 2022

Hayes quickly repeated the Biden Administration’s propaganda, claiming that the domestic oil production has increased.

They will keep hammering this but it’s just complete nonsense on the merits. Trump’s presidency saw domestic production decline not for policy but market reasons. However, it has actually increased. under Biden. https://t.co/aygIkS01Vg

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2022

Modern-leftists don’t verify their facts. This is the problem.  The media has an unwritten moratorium against questioning any narrative. The media defends Hayes’ points inexplicably or just because of their bias, stating that the statement can be true when viewed with a particular lens.  We are fortunate that the internet is here to question Hayes statements.

This fact should be as objective as possible. We have to give Hayes the benefit-of the doubt.  Hayes could be talking about the entire time that a person has been in office. Or he might refer to any month-to–month or year-to–year reduction as a reduction. Cherry-picking a month-to-month reduction for Trump and then comparing that to the totality of Biden’s tenure is not a fair comparison.  Hayes or Biden have engaged in disingenuous comparisons of various times to arrive at a dishonest outcome (shocking! Or his assertion is false. There isn’t another alternative.

Naturally, the fact-checking sources that I used will be challenged. To provide statistics about US Domestic Oil Production, I chose to use U.S. Energy Information Administration. This is yet another agency that I didn’t know existed.

2016 was the final year of Obama’s Administration. It ended with an average annual oil production of 3.23 trillion barrels per year.  While we will give Obama full January 2017, please note that Obama resigned on January 20, 2017. The month saw 275 million barrels oil produced. Trump’s first month started with 255 million barrels, and his first year ended with 3.41 billion barrels of production, an increase over Obama’s previous year, but lower than Obama’s highest year of 3.44 billion barrels a year (2015). Trump’s final year as president was marked by an average annual production of 4.12 billion barrels and a monthly output of 342,000,000 barrels in January 2021.  Trump’s production did decline at times, due to lower prices, not government bans on exploration, production, and transport.

Biden’s first month in office reduced domestic production to 273 million barrels for the month, and 2021 closed with 4.08 billion barrels of oil.  March of 2022, the last month the data is provided, shows domestic production at 361 million barrels, up slightly from Trump’s 342 million barrels in January 2021, but below Trump’s highest of 400 million barrels in December 2020. In comparison, the US average gallon price for gasoline in December 2020 was $2.19.  The average cost for a gallon of gas in March of 2022 was $4.42, more than double the per-gallon cost during Trump’s highest month of production.

Hayes’s statement, if comparing two similar data points (that is, either their entire time in office or a month-to-month comparison), is totally and completely false.  Trump had production reductions, but Biden did not.  Between January 2022 and February 2022, production fell by 36,000,000 barrels. That was ten percent less than the average national increase in gas prices.  Trump experienced a greater increase in domestic production than Biden during his two-year tenure. All this while paying per gallon prices that were half the current Biden Administration rates.

Hayes’s statements also ignore that domestic production could be even higher had Biden not taken the action he has against domestic oil production. If there were more leases and more transport means for exploration, production and transportation, domestic production could have been much greater and prices would be lower.  According to industry sources, supply chain problems have prevented sufficient pipe imports in order to extract oil.  A lot of the pipe we have today is resold used pipe.

Overall, nothing about Hayes’s statement could be interpreted as accurate considering the context in which he placed his comments. Trump has seen production declines but Biden too, who both have witnessed an increase in domestic oil production during their tenures. Biden’s annual domestic production is down below that which he inherited when he took office. To suggest that Trump’s domestic production was somehow below that of Biden is disingenuous hogwash.