President Biden touted the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and criticized Big Oil profits while saying oil would be needed “for at least another decade” in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. Connecting the devastation wrought by across the country by “record floods, droughts, storms and wildfires” to climate change, Biden touted IRA provisions aiding recovery in investment in climate-resilient infrastructure along with “clean energy Clean energy to cut pollution and create jobs in communities often left behind.”
Biden also criticized Big Oil for making “$200 billion in the midst of a global energy crisis” while “invest[ing] too little of that profit to increase domestic production.” Biden said the U.S. will “need oil for at least another decade … and beyond that,” slammed oil companies for using “the record profits to buy back their own stock, rewarding their CEOs and shareholders.”
Biden has previously called for taxing what he described as Big Oil’s “windfall of war” and Tuesday night called for quadrupling taxes on corporate stock buybacks. Biden also called out Republicans whose districts have benefited from the IRA despite their votes against it. Of his “Republican friends who voted against [the IRA] I still get asked to fund the projects in those districts as well, but don’t worry,” Biden said. “I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. We’ll fund these projects. And I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.” (E&E News, The Hill, Vox, Bloomberg $, Grist, Slate, E&E $, E&E $, USA Today, Washington Post $, grid.news)