trying to keep gas prices low. lowering prices that people pay at the pump. i think most folks it s estimated that the administration fell well short. bret: in november 2021, president biden announced the first major release from the strategic petroleum reserves. i will do what needs to be done to reduce the price you pay at the pump. bret: the stockpile at that point held more than 600 millio. the 50 million-barrel drawdown was the largest release in history. the weekly average for regular gasoline at the time was $3.40 per gallon. bret: is there a sense that the spro is something that should be tapped. can be tapped more frequently or only for the ultimate emergency? you don t want to do it for political purely political purposes and president biden didn t do that in this case. here we had the unprovoked war of aggression by vladimir putin on the innocent people of ukraine and i think that was entirely appropriate at that point to tap the spro.
wouldn t be able to sell it to countries like china, that any releases from the spro would be tied to developing oil and gas leases on federal land. what jennifer granholm said about a similar measure in the house. i ll be very clear, if congress were to pass hr21 the president would veto it. the backwards agenda the house republicans are advancing. is using the strategic petroleum reserve for what it s intended backwards? not at all. you started the report earlier today that gas prices are up $0.40 in the last month. people want affordable energy, available energy, reliable energy, and joe biden basically has lit dynamite under the industry the day he came into office. he did it by, you know, throttling the keystone pipeline, stopping oil and gas permits, and what happened. prices went up and people got furious. john: and yet granholm is
sandra: they wouldn t let him. trump tried to fill it, and he was not able to. republicans say if you want to sell oil out of spro, you have to have a federal opening for leasing for oil and gas production. pretty clever. it s not fabulous, it does not do permitting but 5% sales of spro, you ll have to open up 5% of federal lands for leasing on oil and gas fracking. sandra: genius, genius. clever. it s clever, and smokes them out. here, too, they ll do anything not to let us turn the spigots back on for oil and gas production. sandra: they say they are all for it now, touting record oil production in the country. still a million barrels a day short of where we were precovid. i mean sandra: we have him all fired
can i tell you this, spro was never meant to be for gasoline prices. it s for national security. 40, 50 years ago we had the arab oil embargo, they cut us off, ok. and they were long lines and people were killing each other in the long gas lines. spro is there if you have a bad weather emergency in texas or california or someplace, florida. sandra: you are suggesting it s political to bring gas prices down before the midterm elections. read the legislation, never intended for short-term gas line prices, never intended for that. and they denied it at the beginning. sandra: and she patted the government on the back for filling the spro for $80 a barrel, buying it back for less than we sold it on the market. who killed it in 24?
my power to reduce gas prices since putin s invasion of ukraine caused these price hikes these prices to spike and rattle international oil markets. carley: president biden denies he is tapping our strategic oil reserve once again to score political points ahead of the midterm elections 19 days from now. todd: the wall street journal editorial board is not buying it, quote: the new releases are answer so of political desperation. we have been writing for months that mr. biden could deflate oil prices giving a simple speech declaring an end to political war on fossil fuels. instead he resorts to gimmicks like the spro. smarter than administration officials think and so are voters. mike huckabee joins us now. great to see as always. from the wall street journal to the cover of the new york post this morning. gas backward. joe is full of malarkey again. are you calling malarkey on joe