President Biden took a victory lap in his war on fossil fuels during his recent trip to Tokyo. He told a Japanese audience that the high U.S. gas prices largely created by his administration are a tremendous shift away from reliance on fossil fuels. He dismissed the pain that consumers are going through at the pump as a necessary part of an “incredible transition” that “will make us stronger and less reliant” on such fuels. Mr. Biden chose Japan as a venue for revealing the real agenda behind his war on gas and oil because he knew that if he ever said anything like that in front of an American audience, his unprecedentedly low poll numbers would likely sink into the negative range. When speaking to American audiences, he blames Putin’s war and other factors for the misery that American motorists are undergoing.

Even Congress is finally noodling through the fact that high gas prices are here to stay is administration policy. In a May 19^th testimony, Energy Secretary Deb Haaland stubbornly refused to concede that prices at the pump are too high. She stopped short of admitting that they are not high enough, but her department has been doing everything in its power to drive them up. It has refused to appeal a judicial ruling on gas and oil leases and will allow nationwide offshore drilling to expire this month.

Biden has placed himself in a pickle. Having sold his soul to the radical left regarding the elimination of fossil fuels, the President is watching energy prices go through the roof. He can’t shake the responsibility, and he even glories in it when overseas. Here at home he and his administration have tried blaming the Russians, COVID, and corporate price gouging; but none of it has worked. Americans remember pre-COVID 2020 when gas was reasonable as were other consumer prices. They also remember that the Democrats promised change and that change happened, but in a way that leaves most of us appalled.

Except for Biden’s unneeded stimulus spending, the price of gas drives most other aspects of inflation ranging from the supply chain of new vehicles to food prices. Instead of looking in the mirror, Mr. Biden is blaming his cabinet for not getting the message out. The problem is that the message is disastrous, and it is hard to get the pig to wear the lipstick. It does not help that the most diverse cabinet in history is also the most incompetent since that of President Grant. When you pick your assistants solely based on race, gender, and sexual preference you should not be surprised when you get second string results. The President has an Energy Secretary in active denial, a Transportation Secretary on maternity leave during the gas and supply chain crises, and a Secretary of the Treasury who admits incompetence. Mr. Biden has only himself to blame because he handpicked them.

The gas price debacle is a direct result of Biden’s stated policy of forcing electric vehicles on the American public. Not only are consumers reluctant to buy the “klown kars,” but the infrastructure to charge them does not exist and will fall short even with the funding authorized in the infrastructure legislation passed last year. This spring, I did a little experiment on a drive from Daytona Beach, Florida, to Upstate New York. I pretended that I was in an electric car and looked for convenient charging stations along the I-95. By my calculation, I would have made it to Darien, Georgia, before I ran out of juice.

Administration officials have refused to consider technological solutions to reduce Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Technologies such as Carbon scrubbing that would remove the offending element without destroying fossil fuel-based industries and eliminating millions of jobs. Such solutions are anathema to leftist progressives who believe that fossil fuel businesses are inherently bad and must be eliminated or at least severely curtailed. All the possible candidates who might replace Mr. Biden in 2024 have bought into this ideology. At a minimum, we are stuck with two more years of a misery index that is spiraling out of control and a President who is pleading with some of the world’s worst actors to bail us out of our self-inflicted energy woes. Even if the Republicans capture both houses of Congress, they will not be able to extract us from the President’s ill-advised executive decrees and his cabinet’s wacky policies.

The gas price crisis is not a MAGA driven conspiracy. As he admitted in his Tokyo remarks, Biden is on a crusade against fossil fuels. He is doing so without a viable strategy to replace them. Regarding energy, the President has gotten just about everything wrong. The only thing he could do worse would be to appoint Kamala Harris as Gas Price Czar.

Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis at the graduate level. He was a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense during the George W. Bush administration.