The energy crisis is well upon us and, like most things Democrats get us into, it was wholly avoidable if common sense approaches had been taken from the beginning of their time in power, a time that’s expected to soon draw to a close at this rate.

(READ: Rising Gas Prices May Have Put the Final Nail in the Democrats’ Midterm Coffin)

On Fox News’s “The Five,” host Greg Gutfeld and his fellow panelists got onto the topic of the energy crisis and began talking about President Joe Biden’s excuses about how our skyrocketing prices at the pump were the result of Russia’s war on Ukraine and America’s subsequent refusal to buy any more fuel from our enemy to help fund their war on the innocent.

As first covered by The Daily Wire, Gutfeld swept aside the attempt by Biden at making the suffering we Americans are going through as something we must endure in order for western values of freedom to thrive and called the Biden administration out for making this a situation worse than it has to be through its incompetence and dangerous obsession with the climate narrative:

“[Biden] said defending freedom comes at a cost,” Gutfeld explained. “And that is not true. That is not. It’s the environmental clap trap that comes as a cost. This is not about freedom. There would be no cost if we didn’t demonize drilling, if we didn’t shut down pipelines, if we didn’t demonize fossil fuels.”

“So, it’s not about defending Ukraine,” he added. “It’s about exposing the destructiveness of, I would say, the green ideology, which is part of a larger ideology of punishment, right? Rich countries can handle this, just pay more gas. It’s the poor countries that are going to suffer and it’s going to be poor people in the United States, right?”

“So, you have Twitter celebrities like George Takei and other losers who will say ‘you know, you should pay more to support Ukraine,’ but they’re not truckers, they’re not salesmen, they’re not Uber drivers,” Gutfeld continued. “This is the same detached mentality that we found with shutdowns, right? Everybody could handle a shutdown if they were in the media, because all we did we did our shows from our living rooms. And same people that tell us to live with it can live with anything. So, that’s either climate change, COVID, inflation. And once you see that you can’t unsee it. There’s an ideology of punishment, and it’s that you can handle the punishment, they’re above it.”

Gutfeld is correct. It’s easy for people at the top to endure these hikes in cost but for many average Americans, this is going to be brutal. It’s incredibly sad to think that this all could have been avoided if the Biden administration hadn’t moved against the oil and gas industry in America from day one, including shutting down construction of the Keystone KL pipeline. It should infuriate Americans that this was all done in the name of virtue signaling about the environment to boot.

As my colleague Jim Thompson covered, the Biden administration’s attempts to make America a country completely free of fossil fuels is a pipe dream as many of the necessary materials needed to make us energy independent involve strip-mining the earth, and even then these materials are very expensive and most of them are owned by our enemies such as China.

It’s not happening, but energy independence is definitely within our grasp.

Moreover, Biden’s excuse that this crisis is due to the war in Ukraine is absolute drivel. As Ted Cruz pointed out, these prices began heading upward before Russia decided to invade.

(READ: Ted Cruz Lays Down Hard Truths About the Biden Administration and Its ‘War on Energy’)

This is the Biden administration’s fault. Full stop. It was the Biden administration that did what it said it’d do from day one and clamped down on oil production here in the states. Moreover, the excuse that there are 9,000 federal drilling leases is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts as Mike Sommers of the American Petroleum Institute made clear.

“Just because you have a lease doesn’t mean there’s actually oil and gas in that lease, and there has to be a lot of development that occurs between the leasing and then ultimately permitting for that acreage to be productive,” he said. “I think that they’re purposefully misusing the facts here to advantage their position.”

So Gutfeld is right. Biden is attempting to use patriotism, the war on Ukraine, and the dismissal of his administration’s red tape when it comes to drilling in order to hide the massive failures he and the Democrats have created.