I grew up with Blaine Luetkemeyer. Missouri doesn’t need his propaganda on Ukraine

The chorus echoing around the Republican side of the U.S. House of Representatives accuses President Joe Biden’s administration of failures resulting in higher energy prices.

Consider Blaine Luetkemeyer, Missouri’s 3rd District congressman. In his “Blaine’s Bulletin” of March 4, Luetkemeyer writes: “The administration should have understood the urgency and started prepping last fall when the real threat first began. We should have been providing Ukraine — our ally — with the necessary resources to defend themselves.”

We know from European sources that Biden was firming up the Western alliance before the Russian invasion. Blaine’s beloved Trump administration didn’t just fail to support Ukraine; it withheld defense funds allocated by Blaine’s own Congress to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into an investigation of Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, Donald Trump told us all that NATO was obsolete and threatened to pull the U.S. out of it.

Blaine then veers from propaganda to untruth: “And shutting down our domestic energy sources like the Keystone Pipeline has forced America to be in business with Russia which, as we are seeing unfold before our eyes, is a disastrous place to be.”

The Keystone pipeline has been operational since 2010. The Biden administration has not caused any pipeline shutdown. It revoked project approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, which could not be operational anyway for multiple years. Neither Keystone nor Keystone XL supports domestic crude oil. They are designed to carry heavy Canadian crude from oil sands.

Luetkemeyer also misrepresents the trend of American oil imports from Russia. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, our country’s imports from Russia rose from near zero in 2000 to about 500,000 barrels per day by 2008, fell somewhat to 350,000 by 2014, then rose to 650,000 barrels per day during the Trump administration.

Luetkemeyer continues: “In 2019 and 2020, after decades of depending on foreign powers to sell us oil, the United States was finally energy independent. Unfortunately, when President Biden assumed office, he forfeited our place as a top energy exporter and put America in a position to rely on Russia to help heat our homes, drive our cars, and sustain our economy. This month alone, the U.S. is scheduled to import 12 million barrels of oil from Russia.”

Well, domestic oil production increased from about 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to about 9 million in 2016 – not because then-President Barack Obama was a friend or foe of the oil business, but because of the technological breakthrough known as fracking. Oil production reached a higher peak at the end of February 2020 and fell sharply — during the Trump administration — as the COVID-19 pandemic affected both supply and demand. Domestic production has increased somewhat since Biden took office and is projected to reach 12,600,000 barrels per day in 2023.

A decrease of Russian imports to 12 million barrels per month (about 400,000 per day) is good news compared with our import rate of about 20 million barrels in October 2020, for example. Now, the administration has banned Russian oil imports altogether.

Check this claim from Luetkemeyer: “I signed onto the American Energy Independence from Russia Act. This bill would flip the American energy switch back on and allow us to once again be our own providers of oil and gas, increasing our national security and shoring up our economy.”

Luetkemeyer wants you to believe the Biden administration has somehow flipped a switch to stop American companies from producing oil so that the Russians can take advantage of us. This is nonsense.

American presidents don’t dictate oil production rates or gasoline prices. Biden has not shut down any pipelines. He hasn’t banned drilling or fracking, nor could he. His administration has paused permits for new drilling on federal lands, affecting maybe 7% of future — not current — production.

The U.S. and our allies now see how awful it is to depend upon Russian hydrocarbons. The Germans must deeply regret their decision to phase out nuclear power. We will increase oil and gas production in the short term — through our free enterprise system — and though renewable energy can’t be a complete short-term replacement for hydrocarbon, the world would be better off if we could simultaneously move toward sustainable energy, stop colluding with petro-tyrants like Russian President Vladimir Putin and create domestic jobs. But expressing that kind of thought doesn’t fit the ideology of Luetkemeyer’s party.

I wish that in his State of the Union address, Biden had advised us that necessary actions could result in higher gasoline prices. He didn’t. Luetkemeyer, like Biden, fails to make this honest statement but goes further into lies.

How eerie it is to see Soviet-style propaganda at work against Ukraine and to see it simultaneously from a U.S. congressman.

This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.