U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently spoke about the ongoing intervention in Iran and its negative effects on energy production, blaming the nation's lack of domestic energy production and processing on its past climate policies.
Gas prices are rising across the nation, with no end in sight, as President Donald Trump has placed even more strain on the global energy market with a military blockade in the Persian Gulf.
Gas prices in the United States have soared nationwide. Alabama has an average of $3.84 per gallon, the second-highest among its neighboring states, coming two cents under Tennessee.
Tuberville told reporters on Wednesday that the blockade was needed to stop the Iranian regime, which he referred to as the “Republican Guard,” from being able to continue exporting oil to fund its operations.
“Those people over there don’t care whether they die or not,” Tuberville said. “The Republican Guard is a dictatorship, and they have control of their people over there. We’re trying to free their people where they can take their country back over again.”
He continued, “We have to stop them from being able to fund everything they’re doing. Again, they don’t care about dying; they just need money to make sure other people die. We need to stop that.”
Trump and others in his administration have tried to assuage concerns about rising gas prices by touting the country’s oil production. However, what is typically missing from the administration’s attempted exculpations is that the oil pumped stateside must still be refined, and it is the nation’s refining shortcomings that make us reliant on imported fuel.
Tuberville noted this in his comments to reporters, blaming the climate policies of previous administrations pushed by climate activists who Tuberville called “climate nuts.”
“Every day Americans are paying higher energy prices; they're going up,” Tuberville said. “Here's the thing, there's a lot of things that’s coming to light here. Not just the blockade or the war. One thing that's coming to light is we are making progress in terms of opening up more oil wells [and] pumping more oil. The problem is too, it goes back to what these climate nuts have done over the years that has not allowed us to build more refineries. We've got to build more refineries.
“We don't refine the oil that we pump here. People don't realize that. We have light crude here. We take crude from other countries that [export] heavy crude and we process that. We refine that. So, it's an ongoing cycle here of knowing and finding out we have been wrong in a lot of areas when it comes to this climate hoax that these people have been pushing on us.
He concluded, “So at the end of the day, we're going to have higher prices because of what's going on in the war. Let's let President Trump do what he needs to do to block people from coming out. Let's put a little pressure on the people that are our enemies, and hopefully in the long run, we'll get oil back to $70 [or] $60 a barrel, where the American people will have a lot better life.”
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