President Joe Biden still doesn’t understand that high energy prices are at the heart of his embarrassingly low public support and a huge barrier to his reelection.

His Department of the Interior revealed this last week in its belated, legally mandated five-year plan for federal oil- and gas-leasing rights. Not content to have repeatedly tried to limit leases that had been approved, Biden now proposes to sell the smallest number of offshore drilling rights in the history of the federal leasing program. He would also entirely stop leasing off the Alaska coast and in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Only the Gulf of Mexico would be allowed new leases, just three sales in five years. In an early draft of the plan, the Interior Department considered 11 new leases, far higher than what was eventually allowed, so the proposal of just three is a bitter blow to domestic producers and consumers hoping future prices might be lower than they are now. The limit of three is more stringent than the two five-year plans of left-wing former President Barack Obama, who approved more than 10 leases each half-decade. President Donald Trump had planned to propose 47 new lease sales, nearly 16 times as many as Biden.

This and similar congressional actions are necessary to fight against Biden’s obsessive war on fossil fuels. It would be even better if we didn’t have a president who made such legislation necessary.

The prior five-year plan expired in June 2022, so Biden is more than 15 months late with his proposal. Those months of uncertainty combined with the announcement of an indefensibly tight new limit are having the effect Biden intended, which is to hobble domestic energy production. It does the environment no good, though, because other nations with less stringent environmental regulations, emissions limits, and safety rules drill more to make up the difference. Biden’s energy and climate policy is pure vacuous posing.

Domestic limits are also a national security risk because the countries that will most benefit from dwindling American competition are Russia, Iran, and China, all of which treat the United States as an enemy in every way short of open warfare.

Consumers will suffer the most. Since the presidency of Jimmy Carter half a century ago, there has been a correlation between energy prices and government restrictions on production and distribution. The more restrictions, the higher the prices, not just at the gas pump but also for home heating and air conditioning and all consumer goods that require transportation. When it costs more to transport and refrigerate food and more to pay the energy costs for factories that produce consumer goods and retail equipment, there is no corner of the economy untroubled by Washington’s misgovernment on energy.

Biden seems not to care. He canceled the Keystone pipeline, halted existing Alaskan leases, and tried to halt approved leases and another major pipeline until Congress or the courts ordered them to proceed. The average cost of a gallon of gasoline nationwide has risen from $2.39 to $3.96 on Biden’s watch. Job losses, or the failure to create expected new jobs, have also been costly. Killing Keystone meant 59,000 fewer jobs.

When Biden lost a court battle two weeks ago to restrict a congressionally approved lease sale in the Gulf, his excuse was that he was trying to protect a rare species of whale. To make sure appeals courts don’t reverse the preliminary ruling and to ward off even more creative obstructive tactics, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) led four other colleagues last week in introducing the WHALE Act, which stands for Warding off Hostile Administrative Lease Efforts. It would prohibit most of the restrictions Biden was trying to impose and would require the Interior Department and Commerce Department to prove that new regulations aimed at protecting the supposedly threatened subspecies of whale “will not have a negative impact on supply chains, United States offshore energy production and generation, military activities, including readiness, and United States commercial and recreational fishing or maritime commerce.”

This and similar congressional actions are necessary to fight against Biden’s obsessive war on fossil fuels. It would be even better if we didn’t have a president who made such legislation necessary.