Gas prices and energy costs have skyrocketed dramatically in recent weeks due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but had already surged quite significantly over the past year since President Joe Biden first took office.

Biden is now attempting to blame the entirety of the inflated pricing on Russian President Vladimir Putin, but a former Keystone XL pipeline worker has asserted that the blame rests largely with Biden’s own anti-domestic energy production policies, Fox News reported.

That energy sector worker, Neil Crabtree, told the outlet that “We tried to warn this administration” that canceling the Keystone XL pipeline project, which Biden did on his first day in office, was the same as “canceling national security, foreign policy, and energy,” given that “they all kinda go hand-in-hand.”

Fault begins and ends with Biden

Fox News noted that the price of a barrel of oil, and subsequently the price of gasoline, surged up this week as President Biden announced a U.S. ban on the import of Russian oil and refined petroleum products, which he admitted would further drive up the costs Americans have to pay for gas and countless other products derived from oil.

Incredibly, in addition to trying to blame the actions of Putin over the past month for price increases over the past year, Biden also laughably asserted that “it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”

Freelance journalist Drew Holden, however, compiled a fascinating and revealing tweet thread featuring a plethora of mainstream media articles over the past two years proving the exact opposite — that Biden’s policies from the very start were deliberately and explicitly aimed at reducing domestic energy production and driving up the cost of doing business in that sector, ostensibly to spur along a transition to “green” renewable energy sources.

Administration falsely smearing domestic energy producers

“Even if we can fix the Ukrainian problem, the prices are still going up,” Crabtree told Fox, as Biden’s “policies have everything to do with the rising fuel prices in this country today” and “It has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine.”

The former pipeline worker then turned his attention to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who in recent days and weeks has pointed the finger of blame for high energy costs at not just Putin but also U.S. oil and gas producers themselves, and has accused them of simply sitting on thousands of already approved permits for drilling on public land.

That repeated claim from Psaki — that there are 9,000-plus unused drilling permits — was thoroughly debunked as disingenuous falsities in a thread of tweets by former Trump transition adviser and attorney Steve Milloy, who explained all of the countless other things necessary for successful exploration and drilling aside from the particular permits Psaki has harped on.

Crabtree told Fox on that topic, “There’s no energy company [that’s] gonna spend the money to develop a new lease if they can’t build a pipeline to move the project,” referencing, of course, the cancelation of the Keystone XL project as well as other lesser-known pipelines around the country.

Asking rivals to produce more energy while refusing to produce more ourselves

Then there is also the recent news shared by Psaki in a press briefing that, rather than encourage more domestic production, the Biden administration was instead seeking increased production from other oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia along with others that are avowed enemies of America — such as Iran and Venezuela.

“When I’d first seen the reports of the president going to places like Iran and Venezuela to ask for more oil output, I said ‘this is fake news, he hasn’t gone this far off the rocker,’” Crabtree told Fox. “But I guess that’s the path they want to take,” he added. “Why not invite North Korea? Maybe they’ve got a few barrels of oil that they can spare?”