BUCK: The price of gas going up, up, and up, and no one thinks it’s gonna come down anytime soon. There are some even betting it might get up to $180, $200 a barrel. This would be stuff that really rocks the economy, and the Democrats are in quite a bind here because while their principles are very pliable, their polls are not, and they certainly don’t want to give themselves a bigger problem than they already have going into the midterm election. I think you see gas at record high prices through the summer and in November, we might be talking 50, 60 seats switching. You have to start to ask the question, “How bad can it actually get for them?” Clay, you drive all the time. You’re a guy out in the car.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What does it cost right now to fill your car with gas?

CLAY: I spent $108 yesterday to fill my tank, and I drive an SUV. That is the most that I have ever spent to fill any gas tank anytime, ever. Now, I live in Nashville where the price of gas… It’s not like I’m in San Francisco. It’s not like I’m in New York City, places where the rates, L.A., are gonna be much higher. But when I am standing there watching the numbers continue to go up and it got to 107 bucks, I was kind of in disbelief.

I’m fortunate that that is not gonna substantially impact my family’s budget, but I have been — in many times in my life — in a situation where a situation where that would have substantially impacted my family’s budget. I’ve this said before, Buck. But when I had my second son, he was less than a year old, I think, I got fired from a job because they were shutting down a sports place where I was working. It wasn’t that I had done anything bad. I was making $40,000 a year with two kids, a 2- and 1-year-old.

That’s when you are sitting around doing the math and thinking, “Man, I don’t have that much extra here,” and there’s a lot of people out there right now when you’re talking about $100 and more to fill up a tank of gas, and when you’re having to fill it up, you know, a couple times a week for a lot of people who are driving out there and your budget… That is a very real. We talked a lot about tax cuts and tax hikes. It’s a very real tax hike.

BUCK: This means buying less food for some people, less groceries. This means taking the steak or the hamburger out of the cart and replacing it with chickpeas or something else because you’re gonna get your protein from a less expensive source. These are the kind of decisions that people are gonna be making as a result of the increase in gas prices here. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat member of Congress, wants you to know, “Hey, guys we’re fighting a dictator here.”

JAYAPAL: If we ever want to be truly free of the ability of dictators to blackmail us over oil and gas, we should be investing right here at home in renewal energy technologies! We should be weaning ourselves of fossil fuels so that this situation that we’re in does not happen again in terms of, y’know, feeling like we can’t stop Russian oil and gas imports because it’s gonna drive up prices here at home. By the way, no matter what we do, prices of gas where going to go up. So any Republicans who tries to that it’s “drill, baby, drill” and that solves the problem, it’s wrong. That is not the case. We are going to see gas prices rise. But it is in service to trying to quell a dictator.

BUCK: Notice there’s so much dishonesty and wrong here, Clay. I don’t know which parts it you want to chew on first. I’ll throw a couple of them out there. There is a religious zeal that the Democrat Party has toward… I mean, they say, “It would take too long to drill, baby, drill. Let’s do renewables!”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Renewables in a best-case scenario might solve this problem for the Clay Travis grandchildren to enjoy, okay?

CLAY: (laughs) Right.

BUCK: Maybe in 30, 40, 50 years there will be renewable energy solving the global — and, by the way, I think that’s actually overly optimistic. But the point is, notice they say, “Drilling for gas would take too long. Let’s focus on renewables!” It’s not so much that they’re idiots, although that’s a part of it. It’s that Democrats have an emotional attachment to the Green New Deal, which comes up against this reality right now of they’ve put us in a weaker position dealing with the dictator overseas that they’re not actually going to even deal with by sanctioning the energy sector in the first place. All their ideas are wrong.

CLAY: Yes, and I would just point to a guy who is the patron saint of many people who believe that we are over-relying on fossil fuels. Elon Musk. Elon Musk came out… Obviously, Tesla is predicated on the idea of electric vehicles and moving away from the idea of gas-powered engines. He said we need more oil production in the United States, and we need more nuclear power in the world.

So ultimately, I understand the argument even though I think I agree with you, Buck, that it’s a fanciful idea. But when you’re saying we can’t have more fossil fuels right now, the way to get off of this petro-dictator treadmill — which I agree we should be trying to get off of — to me is twofold. We should be doing things. We should, one, be producing as much oil and gas as we possibly can in the United States, which the Biden administration has disallowed.

If Trump were here, we’d be producing more. That’s the drill, baby, drill idea. We also simultaneously can be trying to develop more resources to wean our necessity to need fossil fuels in the future. I don’t see this as an either/or option, and maybe this is crazy that I don’t. I want us to be as energy independent as we can wherever the energy comes from, but the focal point to solve this issue right now is to produce as much oil and gas as we possibly can in the United States of America.

BUCK: Putin is making long-term calculations about this. He has to think about what’s it gonna look like in six months, in 12 months, if the U.S. turns on the full force of its fossil fuel production. Putin was quieter for a while. Many of the petrostates were quieter for a while because of the increased U.S. production from shale oil. You can make an argument that shale oil in the U.S. did more for national security over the last decade or two than any other single thing in the world.

Shale oil was enormously influential in hurting the worst economies, the biggest aggressors on the world stage — Iran, Russia, Venezuela, you name it. Here is even ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Clay, pointing out we’re talking about, “We’ll do anything! We’re talking about a no-fly zone,” which means shooting Russian planes out of the sky, just so we’re clear. That is what a no-fly zone would entail. But we’re not even willing to go after the Russian energy sector. I think we should all be honest about this.

KARL: The key issue here which is the question of — of banning the import of oil and gas from — from Russia. You know, it is not insignificant. Uh, we actually take in more petroleum from Russia than we do from Saudi Arabia. Uh, so — so the ban will result in — and also obviously affects the world supply as well. So you’ll see oil go from about a hundred dollars an you barrel, to 150, to maybe $200 a barrel. But it’s extraordinary, George, for all of the, uh, sanctions that have been imposed — and they have been unprecedented, uh, on — on Russia, to sanction everything but the thing that drives their economy.

BUCK: I mean, Clay, that’s a good point. We should be honest about the cost is. To talk about military escalation from our side without even being willing to look at the economic will or lack thereof in the energy sector I think is to create a huge opening for blunders, and I just had our team here pull this. You know what the highest national average gas price of all time was? It was $4.10 in July of 2008. As of today, Clay, $4.07.

CLAY: We’re basically there, because when the price of oil is up to roughly $130 a barrel, we’re going to go over that dollar figure.