The media don’t really care about high oil and gas prices in principle, because they had no problem spinning it as a climate virtue voters should appreciate when President Joe Biden was in office.
With all the media kvetching about energy prices now under President Trump — which aren’t even close to what they were under Biden — it’s as if they forgot the internet that exposes the lengths to which they bent common sense into a pretzel to protect their side of the aisle when it was politically expedient still exists.
Writers from the global George Soros-funded outlet Project Syndicate, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, Bloomberg News and The Colorado Sun all tried their hand at spinning skyrocketing energy prices pounding Americans’ wallets as a befitting development from Mother Earth. One outlet even tried to shoehorn the insane musings of a random “climate economist” to cast high prices as an “unequivocally” good thing. No, we’re not kidding.
Project Syndicate, which boasts a global presence in 156 different countries with an A-list pedigree of liberal contributors, published a whacked-out October 2021 column by lefty Harvard University Professor Jeffrey Frankel. “High Oil Prices Can Help the Environment,” read the crazy headline.
Frankel’s complete fact distortion set the tone for how many others would spin prices going to the moon, “[T]oday’s higher fossil-fuel prices have so far provided a weaker-than-expected stimulus to private investment in the sector. This suggests that firms may have reached a tipping point in how seriously they take the need to combat global warming. They know a green-energy transition is coming.”
The irony is that this is not the only time that Frankel — who is personally connected to the same Soros who funneled at least $7.6 million into Project Syndicate from 2018-2024 alone — turned economic facts on their head to protect Biden. Frankel, who is also a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), redefined the meaning of the term “recession” in another 2022 Project Syndicate column just three days before the Biden White House and many other media outlets followed suit after it was reported that GDP had contracted two consecutive quarters. It seems he inadvertently defined the parameters for media coverage on gas prices too.
In July 2022, AP climate doom prophet Seth Borenstein and reporter Tom Krisher wielded “climate economist” Solomon Hsiang to bleat how “High gas prices are ‘unequivocally’ good for fighting climate change because people use less fossil fuel and emissions go down, but the poorest people, who don’t have other options also ‘suffer the most.’” The AP concluded based off this nutty angle that “Now people are paying more when they hit the gas station and some are changing their habits.”
Around the same time, then-Bloomberg columnist Eduardo Porter came out with a doozy of a headline, “The Earth Wants Biden to Keep Gas Prices High.” In his hot take, Porter argued that “There’s one bold move President Biden could make to curb climate change: Find a way to put a $5-a-gallon floor on gasoline prices.” Holy inverted reality, Batman!
But he wasn’t the only columnist to pull a stunt like this. In September 2023, Colorado Sun columnist Trish Zornio published another wacky column headlined, “Gas prices are rising, and that’s (mostly) a good thing.” For the sake of fighting the “climate crisis,” exclaimed Zornio, “Paying higher prices for gas is a necessary evil.” But it got worse:
“It’s a nonnegotiable at this point, and we’d be reducing our reliance on fossil fuels a whole lot faster if we weren’t so focused on keeping gas cheap. Hear me out.” Nah.
How about over at The Atlantic? Then-staff writer Robinson Meyer opined in a February 2022 item, “Higher gas prices could be a good thing for the climate, after all, because if oil gets more expensive, fewer people will use it, and less carbon pollution will go into the atmosphere.” The conundrum for Democrats up for reelection in the 2022 midterms, warned Meyer, was whether they “think high gas prices are enough of a problem that they’re willing to raise medium-term carbon emissions over them.”
Wall Street Journal Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip also tried to stretch the foolish “silver lining” angle for Biden on gas prices in a March 30, 2022 piece headlined "How High Energy Prices Could Help Both the Climate and the U.S.," including this Ip-ecac: “Higher prices, if sustained, could reduce global fossil-fuel consumption and encourage the shift to zero-emission energy.”
Not to be outdone, Justin Worland, TIME magazine’s herald of climate Armageddon, lectured readers in a propaganda piece headlined, “Everything You're Hearing About Gas Prices Is Wrong.” In his ridiculous spin, Worland snooted that high prices were a market signal to the economy to shift away from fossil fuels to renewables:
[T]he [Biden] Administration has sought from the very first days in office to send a market signal that fossil fuels broadly are not the future. Indeed, Biden and others in the Administration have argued that such a signal is among their greatest contributions to the climate fight. This dynamic, which is loose to say the least, is hard to quantify and certainly not a primary factor in the high gas price environment we find ourselves in, but it is part of the broader global consensus that money should be shifted away from fossil fuel investment.
Need we say more?
