for The Hill

Today’s surging oil and gas prices confront progressive climate activists with a discomfiting truth: Their campaign to vilify and suppress fossil fuel production has crashed headlong into Americans’ urgent appetite for affordable energy.  

The green left is not happy with President Biden, who is pulling out all the stops to give Americans some temporary relief from punishingly high fuel prices. That includes jawboning U.S. oil companies to drill more, a widely panned proposal to suspend the federal gas tax and Thursday’s controversial visit to Saudi Arabia, whose leaders the White House has implored to boost production to stabilize world oil markets.

It’s true that high fuel prices are heightening the contradiction at the heart of the Biden administration’s climate and energy policies. If your overriding aim is to drive down consumption of fossil fuels, high prices are a good thing. But that’s a hard sell to working families struggling with $5 a gallon gas and soaring utility bills. 

With the midterm elections looming, activists shouldn’t be too quick to pillory Biden — especially since it’s their premature if not utopian demands to abolish fossil fuels as soon as possible that have landed him and his party in this predicament.