Gas prices: Will more drilling bring them down?

Gas hit $4 a gallon in some parts of the country this week, said Henry Payne in NationalReview.com, and “it’s the president’s fault.” That may seem a rather simplistic charge, given the complexity of the global oil market, but it’s the same one the Democratic Party used against President Bush when gas hit the $4 mark in May 2008. And since President Obama is “the most anti-carbon president in U.S. history,” blaming him for soaring gas prices actually has some merit. This is, after all, a president who went “on record supporting higher gas prices” as a way of curbing global warming, and who has consistently “aligned himself with green extremists” in blocking the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and efforts to drill for new sources of oil here in the U.S. Many Americans agree that Obama is to blame, said Major Garrett in NationalJournal.com. Some polls show Obama’s approval rating plunging by 5 to 10 points in recent weeks. Not surprisingly, the Republican candidates vying to replace him have jumped on the issue, with Newt Gingrich promising $2.50-a-gallon gas if elected. “Make no mistake”—the rising price of gasoline could cost Obama the presidency.

It’s ridiculous to think that presidents control gas prices, said Robert Semple in The New York Times. As Republicans were quick to point out when gas prices spiked to $4 a gallon under President Bush, the cost of a barrel of oil is determined by global, not domestic, commodities markets. Prices are high at the moment because of the ongoing surge in demand from the developing world, particularly China and India; a looming European embargo on Iranian oil; and the threat of war with Iran, which could seriously disrupt oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. During Obama’s presidency, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, domestic oil production actually increased by 13 percent, while imported oil dropped to 45 percent of total consumption—down from 60 percent in 2005. But “the facts don’t matter” to Republicans, who are desperate for an issue to run on now that the economic recovery is gaining strength.

“Yes, of course presidents have no direct control over gas prices,” said Charles Krauthammer, also in the Post. But the pain at the pump is helping focus the voters’ attention on Obama’s “rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy.” He continues to block drilling off the mid-Atlantic coast, off Florida, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and on federal lands in the Rockies, while wasting taxpayer dollars promoting solar boondoggles like Solyndra and a laughable project to get energy out of algae. Obama thinks fossil fuels are evil and outdated, and is thus “utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.”

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Sorry to spoil your argument, said Michael Klare in MotherJones​.com, but in the real world of oil, prices are headed up—regardless of who’s in the White House. The demand from China and India is only going to grow in coming years, and as the former CEO of Chevron put it, “the era of easy oil is over.” The planet still has huge reserves of petroleum, but they’re miles under the sea, in the Arctic, buried in shale or tar sands, and in other hard-to-reach locations. Extracting it will be environmentally destructive, accelerate global warming—and cost a lot of money. Oil companies will pass that cost on to consumers. No matter how much drilling occurs in the U.S., “high gas prices are here to stay.”