Gas prices are spiking across the country this week, with the average price at the pump in the Yellowhammer State being $4.03 a gallon, according to AAA.

While the Biden administration has blamed “Putin’s price hike” for skyrocketing costs, many Republicans in Congress are pointing to the president’s own energy policies as the main cause.

In a recent interview on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program,” U.S. Rep. Barry Moore (R-Enterprise) called Biden’s energy policies a “national emergency.”

“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the SPR as we call it, is really for emergencies,” Moore explained, “that’s for national emergencies and Biden’s energy policy’s a national emergency, but it should have never been an emergency. We should never never went down this road.”

The congressman emphasized that the Biden administration caused this problem and wasn’t offering any real solutions to help ease the pain at the pump.

“He created these problems,” he argued, “and now they’re trying to figure out how to offset some of the problems that people are feeling at the pump, and it’s like we say all the time, doesn’t matter if you’re Republican, Democrat, or Independent, you’re not having fun at a gas pump right now.”

Moore said killing the Keystone XL pipeline was just one example of Biden’s bad energy policies.

“Why would we penalize American workers?” he asked. “I mean, 8,000 union jobs we’re cancelled day one we killed Keystone, and I think about 12,000 jobs total. It’s just now they’re trying to go explain away failed energy policies.”

He also advised that a better energy policy might have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine.

“Why not go back to being energy independent, like we were in the prior administration, and let’s allow Europe to get their energy from us?” he asked. “Because when I was in Ukraine that was one of the concerns the parliamentarians had was that now Russia has a green light on Nordstream 2, price of fuel was going up, Putin was making more money, that they were getting really nervous, and this was back in August before everything kicked off and obviously at that point I think a lot of what we’re seeing in Ukraine could have been avoided if we would have managed our energy policy better.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee