If gasoline prices so far are any indication, the pain at the pump will be severe this year. But if you think President Obama cares, you’re wrong. If anything, he’s secretly cheering it on.
IBD editorial cartoon
Already, average pump prices have topped $3.50 a gallon, leading some experts to think they could reach an all-time high of $5 by the summer.
So what’s Obama’s response? He treats it like a badge of honor, saying this week that “gas prices are on the rise again because as the economy strengthens, global demand for oil increases.”
But what else can he say?
During his presidential campaign, Obama admitted he didn’t have a problem with sky-high gasoline prices, he just “would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”
His choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, certainly doesn’t mind them. Before joining the administration he said that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
And last year, Chu claimed “the price of gasoline over the long haul should be expected to go up.”
At the same time, Obama has repeatedly feigned an inability to do anything about oil prices. Last April, he said: “I’m just going to be honest with you. There’s not much we can do next week or two weeks from now.”
But this simply isn’t true.
The country is virtually awash in oil, with as much as 1.4 trillion “recoverable” barrels now available, thanks to new discoveries and advanced drilling technologies, according to the Institute for Energy Research.
That’s about twice the proved reserves in all of OPEC. But much of it is off-limits due to federal restrictions.
If Obama were to announce an aggressive effort to tap our vast domestic oil riches, it would have an immediate effect on prices. If you don’t think so, consider how prices immediately dropped when President Bush simply announced plans to lift a presidential moratorium on offshore drilling in 2008.
Obama says the recent modest increase in domestic production is proof he’s not anti-oil. But this happened despite his policies, not because of them — largely the result of drilling permits issued under Clinton and Bush, and the oil boom on private lands in North Dakota.
Whenever Obama has had the chance to encourage production, he’s done the opposite:
• He needlessly halted Gulf drilling permits after the BP oil spill, and continues to slow-walk them. Permit approvals are less than half their pre-Obama average, and approval times have nearly doubled.
• Obama scuttled the 700,000-barrels-a-day Keystone XL pipeline, despite approval by the State Department after an exhaustive three-year review.
• And he endlessly demonizes oil companies while pushing to sharply raise their taxes.
The truth is that for Obama, low gas prices are the problem, since they would hamper progress toward his “green” Nirvana, where we all hop on government trains and putter around in government-approved electric cars. It’s just that he’s smart enough not to say this out loud.
Seeing as how high fuel prices will only lead to more small business failures, why can’t he be impeached for trying to obstruct a Recovery? He, imo, WANTS a Crash, has been TOLD to use the EPA to CRASH the Economy, and he thinks a crashed economy will make his victory more certain, so of course, he doesn’t mind high gas. We give him too much credit–people aren’t going to switch to “green” energies/vehicles. How do I KNOW? Because, it takes MONEY to buy those green energies/vehicles, and if you’re not working or are under-employed, you simply can’t afford a $40K Chevy Volt. He wants us back to walking, and on the dole, because that’s how he retains/expands his power, and who can opose anyone, ON FOOT?…and THEN, you have to walk to the food bank and then walk back home, marshalling your reserves to walk/bicycle to work, at some government job, if you were lucky-enough to have one.
One should never trust what a politician says, but follow his actions. The Obama administration, despite all the rhetoric, is following a “reverse Robin Hood” policy in his approach to energy he is “robbing from the poor and giving to the rich” — at least to a few of the rich businessmen in the fraudulent carbon offsetting business and via energy taxes to the overly rich and bloated federal bureaucracy he has created.