Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, slammed Joe Biden for energy policies that he said are benefiting Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine by enriching his fossil fuel portfolio.
Fox News reported on Zakaria’s remarks on the attempts to weaken Russian through sanctions:
“It is now clear that the economic war against Russia is not working nearly as well as people thought it would,” Zakaria said. “Vladimir Putin cares less about what these sanctions do to the Russian people than he does about what they do to the Russian state. Thanks to rising energy prices, Bloomberg projects the Russian government will make considerably more revenue from oil and gas than it did before the war, around 285 billion in 2022 compared to 236 billion in 2021.”
“The basic problem with the economic war against Russia, as I have argued before, is that it is toothless because it cannot sanction all Russian energy,” Zakaria said. “The Russian economy is fundamentally an energy economy.”
“Revenues from oil and gas alone make up almost half the government’s budget,” Zakaria said. “And unfortunately, the solution would not be for the West to stop buying Russian energy altogether because with less supply on the world’s market, it would only drive prices even higher.”
Zakaria also has criticized Germany’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline that transports oil from Russia as did former President Donald Trump in remarks at a 2018 NATO summit.
Zakaria also said the Biden administration is hampering domestic production of oil and gas by making it more difficult to finance long-term investments in fossil fuel production.
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