The Biden administration, by pushing to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, is "just trying to finish what the Obama administration started," Rep. Markwayne Mullin said on Newsmax Saturday.
"They're so focused on their agenda, moving us towards dependency on the federal government, which is called socialism, that they can't understand the reality," the Oklahoma Republican told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "Its [Environmental Protection Agency] rulings started in the Obama era, trying to put a strong arm on the EPA to eliminate fossil fuels."
But now, the Biden administration is "eliminating our ability to be energy independent." But if anything, "our dependency on fossil fuels has increased." And to meet that need, the president is looking to places like Saudi Arabia, rather than depending on oil produced in the United States, Mullin said.
"Now we're just importing it, so it doesn't make any sense other than the fact of control," Mullin said. "How do you explain crazy? I don't know how to do that yet. I've been trying to figure that one out. But nothing that this administration does, we can make sense of."
Further, there are additional costs involved in bringing oil in from other countries and refining it here, but "there's no way that he can rationalize in his head that this is a good idea, but he can't back down," Mullin said. "This administration can't back down from their far left."
The far left, he added, has been telling its "doomsday story for so long that they think they're doing their part by eliminating us from drilling oil," the congressman said.
Meanwhile, oil is still being brought from Saudi Arabia, Russia and other places, but "they feel good about themselves because they're tree huggers." After all, production has been cut in the United States, Mullin said.
The administration is also afraid if it doesn't pander to the far left, "their party's going to split right down the middle," the congressman continued.
Mullin, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he looks at transportation and the flow of energy around the world and how vulnerable it is and how easy it is to disrupt it.
"The best way to disrupt a country is to disrupt their supply of energy, and you go back to [former President] Jimmy Carter, what disrupted us the most in the in the late '70s, early '80s was the embargo with OPEC," said Mullin. "So now you're thinking we're going right down this road and we know where this heads because history has a tendency to repeat itself."
But if the United States would return to being energy independent and would rely on supplies in Oklahoma and Texas, "we can solve that problem," he said. "We don't have to go to Saudi Arabia, and he didn't have to fly across the ocean. He can simply come to the middle of the United States. Where, by the way, we're pretty darn red, and we can go work pretty hard. We're ready to do it right now. Start reversing some of this is the policies and let us drill."
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.