The Biden Administration will release more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s a feeble attempt to keep the price of gas from rising more until after this November’s midterm elections. But thanks to Democrats’ past decision to keep Trump from expanding the reserve back when oil was dirt cheap, the amount of oil in the reserve is just too tiny to have much effect on gas prices (and the Biden Administration may only release about 8 percent of the reserve). It’s dumb to release the gas now, when there isn’t an emergency, and gas prices probably haven’t peaked.

As Ed Morrissey noted in 2021, a release of this size is as insignificant as “spitting into the ocean….Fifty million barrels of oil sounds like a lot, right? It’s not — at all. In 2020, when consumption hit its lowest level in a quarter-century, the U.S. consumed 18 million barrels of oil a day.…Essentially, Biden has supplied enough oil to bootstrap consumers for the weekend.”