Larry Kudlow: Biden administration is siding against Native Americans

I want to make a quick point this evening. If you ask him, President Joe Biden will tell you how he's more sympathetic to federal oil leases in the wake of sky-rocketing oil prices and the war in Ukraine. He said it several times, but now comes this story that the Biden administration is siding against Native Americans in a crackdown on oil leasing near their indigenous sites. 

Despite heavy opposition from local indigenous leaders, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (herself of Native American heritage) is expected to finalize a rule banning oil and gas leasing near the Native American historical site of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. 

In her earlier life, Secretary Haaland was a House member from New Mexico. In banning oil and gas leasing, Ms. Haaland cited environmental concerns and the "rich cultural legacy" of the region, but wait a minute, the Native Americans themselves are furious. One tribal leader told Fox News Digital that "the oil companies sure aren't destroying the park, and they have new technology." 

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer wrote a letter last year slamming this proposal. The group opposes the Biden administration's rule saying it would prevent them from collecting much-needed royalties on the land they've held for decades. 

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Another Navajo citizen told Fox: "We are very poor. It's like living in the third world. No help from the government. A lot of us don't have electricity or running water. I'm for drilling. I'm for drilling." She added: "people need the money." 

As we've argued for almost two years now, the Biden obsession with global warming and their regulatory war against fossil fuels is doing way more harm than good. 

The EPA, DOE, Interior and the White House are all run by radical climate ideologues. They are exercising a serious form of central planning socialism and it's inflicting enormous high-cost damage on working families of all kinds, including Native Americans, and it hasn't done one thing to deal with global warming, which is emphatically not an immediate existential threat. 

Meanwhile, a recent Wall Street Journal article notes that the Biden administration has leased out fewer acres for oil and gas drilling offshore and on federal lands than any other administration in its early stages, dating back to Harry Truman. 

President Biden's Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20 — his first 19 months in office. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969–70 leased out fewer acres at this stage in his first term and, by the way, as any energy company will tell you, getting a lease does not guarantee any drilling or fracking rights because these very same climate-obsessive federal agencies will find ways to deny permits and permits are the key! 

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Environmental groups tie up permits in the courts. The Biden administration does its part with their crazy overkill rules, all of which brings me to my last thought. Sen. Joe Manchin thinks he's going to get a permitting reform into the continuing resolution due Sept. 30, but all the House lefties oppose this. Even some Senate Democrats, like Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders, oppose this. 

Meanwhile, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia and Sen. Dan Sullivan from Alaska have a much better approach that would kill red tape, reinstitute regulatory reviews and not spend a fortune doing it. All 50 Senate Republicans are behind this bill, so we'll see how it plays out, but when you get your next electricity bill (which is up 16% from a year ago) or your natural gas–related services bill (which is up 33% from a year ago), or total energy costs that are up 24%, you can thank Deb Haaland and her boss Joe Biden because they're doing everything they can to make your life miserable. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow's opening commentary on the September 20, 2022, edition of "Kudlow."