Bice continues to shill for Big Oil while trying to shake down feds

Last Updated on August 6, 2023, 2:50 AM | Published: January 29, 2023

As she settles into her second term representing Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District’s hottest petroleum stars, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice is doing her best for Oklahoma energy company owners and almost nothing for anyone who is not trying to pull black gunk out of the earth. 

Much of her work this past week was spent as a tireless handmaid for legacy energy profits. On Jan. 26, Bice spoke in favor of H.R. 21, a bill that would greatly expand the amount of federal lands that are opened for petroleum extraction. 

“Since President Biden took office, he has waged a full-on assault on the oil and gas industry,” Bice said. “Instead of unleashing American energy production, he has unleashed our energy reserves. The Strategic Petroleum Level is at its lowest in 40 years. President Biden has abused the SPR, which is supposed to be used for emergency purposes, and weakened America’s energy security. The people of Oklahoma and all Americans deserve more.”

As regular readers might recall, the bill is a bit of gassy nastiness that dovetails with Bice’s recently reintroduced SAVE Act, H.R. 59, which I wrote about last week. H.R. 59’s goal is to close off sales of Strategic Petroleum Reserve SPR holdings to companies that are owned by state sponsors of terrorism like China, which former President Donald Trump hates, but not like Saudi Arabia, which Trump likes a lot. 

But H.R. 21 is a direct cash grab for the petroleum industry that takes away policy making power from the Department of Energy and, as a bonus for Bice, it’s terrible for the environment. It goes like this: if the Department of Energy wants to release barrels from the SPR, it must agree to an equal percentage of federal land being opened for oil and gas exploration. 

I know I am spending a lot of time on SPR, but how Bice and the Republican Party are lining up on this issue says a lot about how they hope to plunder federal lands and give their loudest and wealthiest constituency a huge windfall. 

Now, Bice is arguing that the SPR is at its lowest level in 40 years, and she is correct. The current number is 398.56 billion barrels. If all oil imports ceased, according to an October 2022 story in Bloomberg, the U.S. would have two years worth of oil to offset a massive, concerted embargo in which the entire world stopped selling us oil. 

When Bice talks about “unleashing American energy production,” she does not mention how long the leash is that the federal government has on energy companies, or that the leash only stops short of protected federal lands. 

As authored by U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, R-Washington, HR literally mandates that “the Secretary may not execute the first drawdown of petroleum products in the Reserve after the date of enactment of this subsection, whether through sale, exchange, or loan, until the Secretary has developed a plan to increase the percentage of Federal lands (including submerged lands of the Outer Continental Shelf) under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of Defense leased for oil and gas production by the same percentage as the percentage of petroleum in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that is to be drawn down in that first and subsequent drawdowns.”

Bice is actively participating in a shakedown of the federal government. By requiring federal protected lands to be opened for oil exploration any time a president deems it necessary to protect the domestic oil supply, the bill severely undermines the power of the presidency, puts it in the hands of oil company CEOs and destroys the environment for future generations. 

In Bice’s worldview, that’s a fair trade.

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