re: For those who moved cash to the sidelines

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I think under investment during the oil and gas price crash the last 7 years and the pandemic had much more to do with global oil prices than the sitting US president. Energy prices are high all over the world, not just the USA

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Sort of. Oil is priced internationally, current world production is ~4M bbl\d less than what it was just before COVID (that's the May 2022 number, so it doesn't even count the Saudis expressed cut).

Domestically, due to increasing EPA regulations it's essentially impossible to build a new refinery (we haven't built a new one since 1977, despite increased demand). Instead, refineries have had to expand (and even that is fraught with costs and red tape). Since 2020 there have been something like 5 or 6 refineries which have remained shuttered.

So we have increased demand, but lower supply and lower ability to refine (~1M bbl/day) than we had just prior to COVID and the "green" push from the current administration works only to increase that by making it more difficult to both drill and refine more domestically.