The president has decided to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
"I'm authorizing the release of one million barrels per day for the next six months -- over 180 million barrels," Biden said Thursday.
The move is meant to help bring down gas prices; the national average for a gallon of regular on Thursday was $4.22.
"Putin's price hike that Americans and our allies are feeling at the pump, I know how much it hurts," Biden claimed.
Though the national average has increased since the war began, the national average was already up around $1 before the war. Center-right individuals, think tanks, and special interest groups blame the administration's policies against oil and gas for that increase. One example that gets a lot of mention is Biden's cancellation of Keystone XL.
"It's a Band-Aid, and it doesn't get to the root causes," Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research says about the move. "The problem is that everything he's done has been to make it more difficult to produce energy. If we were just producing at the peak level we were just a couple of years ago, we'd be producing more than that -- almost 1.5 million barrels per day."
Kish also credits the sale of the country's emergency reserves, which were all filled when prices were low, for the rising prices at the pump.
