KERNEN: “For — when prices were much higher, and prices at the pump are much higher, we did hear a lot from the president and the administration and Democrats about profiteering and gouging. And now we’re not hearing that as much anymore. So now what we’re hearing is that some positive moves made by the Biden Administration to lower prices in the markets, the world markets bore — you know, that bore fruit, and as a result, now we have $3 gasoline at a lot of places. So if — if — if oil companies and refiners were able to control the prices and gouge and profiteer at the higher levels, why does the Biden Administration get credit when market forces take over and they do come down, which it always happens? Do you just — is it like the — is it just politicians got a politic, Amos, and they got to — they got to seize an opportunity when prices are high to talk about windfall profits and in the minute they come back down, we don’t hear anything about it anymore when market forces take over. It’s like — is it the same as we’re going to end the fossil fuel industry. They just — they just say this stuff to their base?”
HOCHSTEIN: “Well, Joe, let’s — let’s level set this. When prices were high what we wanted to see — the president was not talking about, you know, higher taxes, what he talked about was increasing production. We released from the SPR. I had conversations as did others my colleagues, with CEOs and other senior executives in the oil industry in the United States, who told us it’s going to take us time to increase production, take us six months, seven months to increase production and bring that to market. They thought that would be by the end of the year. We took the action with the SPR in order to save not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy from the reactions that Putin was trying to do. He’s literally using energy as a weapon against the West. We mitigated that, and gave time to the private sector to be able to invest more and to invest in America to increase production. There was extreme frustration, when several months later, prices were still very high. And we didn’t see the same level of investment and same level of increased production. The president called on them to do it. There were a lot of calls around in Europe, as you saw, they instituted a windfall profit tax on energy companies. That was happening in Europe. President basically came out and said, if you don’t increase production, and you continue to have soaring profits, we’re going to have to see how we give relief to the American public in other ways. So we’re — we’re still hopeful that we see increased production even at these prices. And we have seen companies like Chevron and others, increase the injection of products into — into areas of storage in the East Coast and so on. So, we — we are seeing some progress in some of our conversation with industry and we’d like to see more.”
[Nonsense. They drained it to save their political hides — and it worked. — Ed]
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