Payne: Why did the US import Russian oil at record rates last year?

Ukraine-Russia conflict could push inflation to 10% as invasion begins

FOX Business' Charles Payne, during his latest "Takeaway" on "Making Money," Thursday argued tyrants will use Western funds to power their own "rogue regimes" and questioned why the U.S. imported oil from Russia at record rates in 2021. 

$4 GAS COULD MORPH TO $5 FOLLOWING RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE

CHARLES PAYNE: So the intellects of the West have sacrificed their populations to the volcano Gods of climate change. 

Now Germany is the worst, but American political leaders appear eager to go down this same path and in a way you can't blame Germany, right? 

They're not blessed with the oil and natural gas that we have under our feet. For all these Western leaders, the better part of valor has been buying crude and natural gas from tyrants who will turn around… use those funds to power their own rogue regimes and their conquest dreams. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to a journalists question during a joint news conference with Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban. (Yuri Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP)  (Yuri Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP / AP Newsroom)

This kind of appeasement has rarely paid dividends. 

In fact, the only one I can recall is when Attila the Hun spared Rome at the request of Pope Leo I. 

There simply is no logic to any of this right? Why make heating your home or people going to work prohibitively more expensive? In fact, it really is just cruel. Just think of miraculously, we could all swap our gasoline-powered cars and trucks for EVs overnight, just like tomorrow morning – 95% of us will have to work from home. This country is just not even ready for that. 

Why are we importing a record 232 million barrels of oil from Russia last year? And that was only through November. In fact, we set a monthly record of 26 million barrels last May. 

Speaking of Attila the Hun, he was fond of saying ‘There, where I pass the grass will never grow again.’ I'm thinking by sacrificing their citizens’ prosperity, maybe Western leadership should borrow that phrase. 

Just change it a little bit, ‘because of our allegiance to climate change mania, your dreams of economic freedom will never grow again.’