The results are in: over the past two years, President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies, driven, in part, by his unabashed hostility towards U.S.-based oil and gas production, have been a disaster for average Americans’ household budgets.

Last year, The Heartland Institute calculated that in the first year of Biden’s presidency, his policies had already cost American households more than $1,000 in excess energy costs; that figure has now more than doubled to a whopping $2,300 per household.

I would be remiss not to mention the impact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had on oil prices starting in the spring of 2022. The result was immediate and severe leading into summer, but in the United States, the impact did not need to be as bad as it was. While oil futures take world events into account, predicting low supply, the United States was energy dominant before the Biden administration. The effect of the war in Ukraine wore off over summer, but ongoing hostility towards domestic energy production by the Biden administration has constrained supplies, keeping energy prices artificially high.

The administration was quick to play the “Putin Price Hike” card in the wake of the Russian invasion, but it was Biden’s policies that set us on the path to skyrocketing costs. Keep in mind, before the first bomb dropped in Ukraine, oil prices had already risen 60 percent since Biden’s inauguration, a year before Russian forces entered Ukraine.

How did Biden accomplish such a feat? Easy. Within the first week of his presidency, and in many cases on his first day in office, Biden set to work signing executive orders to curtail domestic energy production. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have benefited both the United States and Canada, restricted drilling in many parts of Alaska, placed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal land and offshore that federal courts deemed illegal, directed the administrative agencies under his control to impose new expensive regulations on oilfield operations, and so much more.

Since then, Biden has doubled-down on anti-fossil fuel policies with horrible consequences for all but the politically connected elites profiting from them.

Since December of 2020, the last month before Biden took office; residential electricity costs have now risen 17 percent, natural gas prices moderated slightly but are still up 51 percent, and the price of gasoline spiked by $1.15 per gallon by the end of 2022. These calculations don’t cherry-pick the peak of gas prices from this past summer; they were measured using U.S. Energy Information Administration data from December 2020 to December 2022.

What this means is, on average, Biden has cost American households at least an extra $650 per year in gasoline costs per driver, $231 in higher electricity, and $780 extra for natural gas.

If you live in the Northeast or another region that uses home heating oil, you are now paying an incredible 88 percent more to heat your home, adding up to about $1,725 extra since Biden entered office.

Industrial electricity prices, which impact the price of goods and services economy- wide, have risen 34 percent.

All in all, the Biden administration’s radical policies have cost American households at least $2,300 extra in energy costs. That’s not including what these high energy costs do to food prices, because of high fertilizer and diesel costs, shipping costs, and the impact on inflation.

Everyone makes mistakes, at first… if indeed they are mistakes. Biden, it turns out, did not make a mistake. His actions are purposeful.

Over just the past year, the Biden administration has slow walked the approval of pending oil and gas leases and has issued the lowest number of new leases since 1940. Biden has been doing the rounds on television, threatening windfall taxes, too. He also passed the first direct federal tax on methane, doubled rental fees on onshore leases, increased royalty rates, and reinstated the Hazardous Substance Superfund Financing Rate on crude oil and imported petroleum, which is a 16.4 cent per barrel tax on crude oil and other petroleum products.

While I’m not totally convinced that Biden knows exactly what he’s signing off on between eating ice cream and watching The Price is Right, the president did make it clear during his campaign that he aimed to destroy the American oil and gas industry, even at the expense of Americans’ livelihoods and pocketbooks.

There is no indication that he plans to lighten up. In this year’s State of the Union Address, he went off-script and admitted that his efforts have had a substantial chilling effect on investment and confidence. Biden recently gave a small consolation prize by approving a decent sized ConocoPhillips’ project in Alaska. However, he then immediately pivoted and banned new exploration and production  on a far larger area in the U.S. National Petroleum Reserve.

Repeating the thoroughly debunked mantra of the “Putin Price Hike” can’t cover up the actual causes of the current energy cost trends. Really, it’s a Biden Cost Balloon, and it’s floating up, up, and away with our checkbooks in tow.