CNN is back to its old schtick of desperately spinning higher gas prices to look like no big deal for Americans, even though they’re currently hovering at four-month highs.
CNN addressed gas prices hitting $3.40 a gallon on Friday, after bottoming out at $3.07 in January. Instead of just reporting the straight news, CNN reporter Matt Egan begged readers in his headline: “Gas prices have surged to four-month highs. Don’t panic.” Egan has become a comedic figure at CNN for persistently doing the facts tango for President Joe Biden to deceive Americans struggling to pay at the pump, so it’s not surprising he’s back to his old tricks again.
Egan warned in his latest spin, “The speedy price increase threatens to unwind progress on inflation and add to the financial pressure some Americans are feeling.” But not to fear though, Egan pleaded, “experts say there is no reason to panic about gas prices, at least not yet. Gas prices always rise at this time of the year.” But it’s not “always” the case that U.S. oil refineries are simultaneously struggling significantly to stay afloat due to increasingly daunting maintenance costs and regulations, inconvenient little factoids that undercut Egan’s entire premise.
Despite Egan’s simplistic take, recent price increases are not just a simple matter of seasonal upswings, as Prices Futures Group Senior Account Executive Phil Fynn told Fox Business on March 13. Flynn cautioned that people were still feeling the lingering “reverberations” of various refinery outages. If the U.S. refinery industry continues to stumble, said Flynn, “‘we could see a continuation of the uptick in gasoline prices that we have seen.’”
But Egan instead strained to find some kind of silver lining in the gas price squeeze. “The good news is that refineries are starting to get healthy again” after the refinery utilization rate “rebounded significantly in early March” following multi-year lows in February, Egan claimed. But as always with Egan’s half-cocked reporting, there are significant holes in his narrative.
American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle ripped Egan’s spin apart in an exclusive interview with MRC Business, saying, “CNN has it completely wrong with respect to the health of U.S. refineries, which are under constant assault from liberal blue state governors and the Biden administration.” Pyle critiqued that Biden and company, given their apathy towards fossil fuels, “have no incentive to increase our overall refining capacity.”
According to Pyle, U.S. oil refining is currently “under pressure by federal and state policies that are prioritizing biofuels and renewable diesel over petroleum refining.”. The American Emergency Alliance president warned that many smaller refineries are “shifting to making smaller amounts of food energy at refineries that used to process oil.” Pyle concluded that the federal policies are basically “driving US refining to mirror California’s, where they have lost 11% of refining capacity over the past decade.
