Editors at the Washington Free Beacon highlight one group that’s happy about the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic impact.
As the economy has ground to a halt due to the coronavirus pandemic, demand for oil has dropped, but Texas rigs have continued to pump it out of the ground. With supply steady but demand dropping, [Oklahoma town] Cushing’s storage tanks filled up. As a result, the people expecting to take delivery of oil in May started dumping those contracts, driving the price for a May-delivered barrel of WTI down. Eventually, something funny happened: The price went negative, reflecting the fact that the bearer would need to pay someone to take the oil off his hands.
Most readers might take this situation for what it is: another strange side effect of the market entering a self-imposed shutdown, combined with the fact that there isn’t that much space in which to store crude oil.
To the Democratic Party’s ecosocialist flank it was something different entirely: the latest sign of impending global catastrophe—perversely, something they are celebrating.
Freshman firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) responded to the news by writing in a tweet she later deleted that “you love to see it”—that is, oil prices dropping below zero. In a subsequent tweet, the Green New Dealer wrote that her fellow environmentalists were celebrating the market fluke “as a turning point in the climate movement” and that “fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline.”
Failed 2020 contender Tom Steyer took to Twitter to argue that “oil is in total free-fall because it is a bad investment that won’t create sustained jobs or prosperity.” The Sunrise Movement, the youth wing of American ecosocialism, claimed the temporary drop is “our chance to publicly own oil & gas companies.”
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