jacqui heinrich starts us off tonight from 1600 pennsylvania avenue. hi, jacqui. hey, gillian, good evening to you. u.s. officials revealed today that the u.s. has not formally requested a phone call with chinese president xi jinping despite president biden saying yesterday that they expected to be talking soon. we re learning that they re hoping that secretary of state antony blinken will first be able to smooth things over and make contact with his chinese counterpart at the munich security conference next week. but, if no meeting ends up happening, it will be a telling sign of where u.s.-china relations stand. chinese spy balloon lifted from the ocean store from south carolina. quantico. we learned a lot already from the balloon by surveilling it while it was flying over the country. we re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it. but u.s. officials are warning we may not learn much more about the three likely harmless objects sho
land management. the lowest number in the last two decades. acreage available for drilling also declined to a 20-year low. i m from wyoming, the energy bred basket parts of this country. we can produce it. we have it. he is making us keep it in the ground. bret: wyoming is one state that recorded declines in production across the board. barrels per day fell from pre-pandemic numbers, the number of wells producing oil declined. and new well construction hit a 20-year low. once a company has a lease, it still has to request a permit to drill. approvals from the interior department did increase in 2021. there are 9,000 unused approved drilling permits. so i would suggest you ask the oil companies why they re not using those if there is a desire to drill more. bret: oil and gas groups say those permits apply only to land already leased for production. and that more acreage is needed to actually increase drilling. what they are really saying