We Hope Obama Will Change Gasoline Prices
Energy: After enduring a holiday season with gasoline prices at all-time highs, Americans are now dealing with record high prices to begin a new year. Does the president plan to do anything?
When Barack Obama took office three years ago, gasoline was less than $2 a gallon. The national city average for a gallon of regular was $1.79. On
Monday, that same regular gasoline cost $3.37, the highest mark ever to start a new year and nearly a full quarter higher than the start of 2011.
Consumers probably saw this coming while Christmas shopping. Gasoline hit $3.21 gallon, a record for the season and an increase of 23 cents over the Christmas 2010 price — the previous record, according to the Heritage Foundation, until it was broken in 2011.
If gasoline prices aren't an issue at this point in the presidential campaign, they could be by summer. Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.com, told the Los Angeles Times that the gas hikes are "setting up an ugly year for motorists." So ugly, DeHaan told ABC, that by Memorial Day he expects gasoline will be $3.86 to $4.13 per gallon.
We know what the Republican candidate will propose to bring down prices. But what will Obama, who, unlike his GOP opponents is in office where he can have an impact, do?
Will he change his mind and agree to let the Keystone XL project proceed? While crude shipped through that pipeline won't be on the market as gasoline for years, giving the project the go-ahead will affect near-term prices as the market reacts to the certainty of increased supplies in the future.
Will the president lower the barriers to development? Heritage reports that "less than 6% of federal lands and 2% offshore are open to exploration, limiting the potential of Americans to produce energy here at home."
Doubling both those figures would bring prices down and still leave large chunks of federal and offshore zones off-limits to drilling.
Will Obama back off his administration's assault on shale oil and gas? With the largest supply of shale resources in the world, the U.S. is sitting on an energy gold mine waiting to be developed. America is the Saudi Arabia of shale.
In fact, U.S. shale has about eight times as much oil as Saudi Arabia's sand.
The president isn't likely to choose any of these options — or any of the many other possibilities available to him that would increase energy production.
His administration is so opposed to drilling that it even ignored U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman's order to lift a drilling moratorium that it imposed in 2010.
Even so, Obama will ask consumers who'll be paying as much as $300 more this year for gasoline than they did last year for their votes in November.
They shouldn't give them to him. The country doesn't need another four years of an elitist president who chokes the power of the market consumers so that he can placate narrow interests.
Just as Judge Feldman did, the voters should hold him in contempt.
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