Americans have been waiting a long time for the gas fairy to visit, but she seems to have disappeared. Now many of us are looking to President Obama, thinking that perhaps he is the gas fairy in disguise.
Lately, there have been a slew of polls that often give opposing results regarding the president’s handling of gas prices. Some polls (Washington Post-ABC News) show that the majority of Americans think the president can control gas prices, and some don’t (Bloomberg National Poll, Rasmussen Reports). The only clear fact is that gas prices are rising, and Americans are unhappy about it.
The GOP candidates have latched on to the president’s sinking poll numbers, trying to drive home the fantasy that President Obama could wave his magic wand and lower gas prices, but he’s not doing that because he hates America and his main goal in life is to destroy it or something.
Mitt Romney has said that the president should fire his top three environmental advisors, calling them “the gas hike-trio,” according to Andy Sullivan of Reuters. Rick Santorum has blamed the 2008 recession on high gas prices, said Rebecca Kaplan on CBSNews.com (most economists have said that the 2008 recession was caused by the bursting of the housing bubble and the related market meltdown later in the year).
If anything, the strongly anti-tax Republicans should be thanking the president for not raising the federal gas tax, which according to the Department of Transportation, has remained at the same rate since 1993, although many states have raised the taxes higher since then. According to a DOT report published in 2009, an increase by 10 cents in the federal gas tax could add $20 million to this country’s coffers, and help bring us out of the recession. These low taxes are one of the major reasons we are not paying $10 per gallon like most of Europe.
On the list of things the president cannot control is the fact that the recession is global, not isolated to the United States. There is also the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a group of 13 countries that supply 40 percent of the world’s oil (the U.S. is not part of OPEC). When OPEC wants to raise the price of crude oil, OPEC reduces production. And since members of OPEC include countries such as Venezuela, Iran, Libya and Nigeria, Western leaders do not hold much sway over these decisions. And let’s not forget conflicts in the Middle East that the U.S. has not caused (believe it or not, there are a few). Most recently, tensions in the region surrounding OPEC-member Iran’s nuclear program.
Newt Gingrich, displaying either gross ignorance or a tendency to lie to voters, promised during a CNN debate in February that he will bring gas prices down to $2.50 a gallon. He would do this, he said, with simple supply-demand economics: drilling more domestic oil.
As usual, Gingrich and his believers stop asking questions before they reach the root of the problem. Utilizing our own supply of fossil fuels is a positive step toward short-term energy independence. But there are a few questions I would pose to Mr. Gingrich about his “plan.”
How long will this $2.50 a gallon gas last? Forever and ever? Or just until the end of Gingrich’s term as President?
What if $2.50 per gallon gas isn’t good enough for me? What if I want to pull up to a gas station like they did in movies from the 1950s and tell the attendant, “Give me a dollar’s worth,” and have that be enough to top off my tank?
“Well, that’s impossible,” you might say. “Those days are gone.”
So, sadly, are the days of $2.50 a gallon gas.
Here is one thing the GOP candidates have not talked about, and it is an undisputed scientific fact (of course, most scientists say the same thing about evolution. Perhaps next the GOP will start saying that the sky isn’t blue): the world’s supply of oil is shrinking. And thanks to simple supply-demand economics, this means that the price of oil will only rise.
Despite the fact that there is still a fair amount of oil left to process in various parts of the world, the staggering growth of countries like China and India means that our remaining supply will quickly dwindle. As these countries develop, more governments will be fighting over what oil is left.
There is no way out of this debacle. Drilling more in national parks and on federal and private land will not speed up the decomposition process of plant matter and dinosaurs, and it will not create more oil.
We need to look farther, toward reducing our energy usage and developing cheaper, more efficient alternative energy sources. If you’re unhappy with the price of gas, don’t point fingers and whine about the president. Become an innovator and help us avoid a world gas shortage, and reduce your own energy consumption. Chugging blindly ahead at the same levels of consumption we’ve had for 60 years won’t change anything.
Kelsey Allagood can be reached at kelsey.allagood@spartans.ut.edu.
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