Deroy Murdock: Joe Biden and a tragic tale of 3 pipelines – Trump's hard-won energy independence is gone

Biden has squandered Trump’s hard-won energy independence, relegated 11,000 American pipeline workers to the unemployment lines, and torpedoed Trump’s diplomacy.

First, on January 20, Biden’s initial afternoon as president, he ditched the Trump-approved Keystone XL pipeline. Some 11,000 high-paying jobs, many unionized, vanished. While these suddenly unemployed Americans sulked, Russian President Vladimir Putin cheered. By trapping Canadian oil underground, Keystone’s cancellation curbed long-term supplies of crude oil. This boosted global prices for Russia’s key export. Indeed, for this and other reasons, crude has crept from $53-per-barrel at Biden’s inauguration to $66 Friday — up 25 percent. Second, the Colonial Pipeline’s operators shut it down May 7 after a Russian ransomware attack. Carteresque gasoline lines soon stretched from Georgia to Washington, D.C. Biden stayed mum until May 10, when he tepidly exonerated the Kremlin.