This week in his address, President Obama went after everybody’s favorite scapegoat, Big Oil. Regarding gas prices he called out speculators and got after oil companies for taking subsidies. Let it be known that these “subsidies” are tax breaks for exploration and extraction. So what’s his big solution that will send fuel prices back down quickly, just like the ocean levels, and with them prices for food, clothing and other necessities?
Instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s. We need to invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that’s the answer. That’s the key to helping families at the pump and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We can see that promise already. Thanks to an historic agreement we secured with all the major auto companies, we’re raising the fuel economy of cars and trucks in America, using hybrid technology and other advances. As a result, if you buy a new car in the next few years, the better gas mileage is going to save you about $3,000 at the pump.
So his solution to our current short-term problem is one that cannot be realized today. All of these renewable technologies are most likely decades away from energy production anywhere near the scale that oil has now, which means that we will be dealing with higher gas prices for quite a while to come. Oh, but did you notice that in his solution he never even pretended to want to do something to help lower gas prices soon? He only wants to make you buy a new car so you can save $3,000. How about lower prices and more efficient cars? This is a case of making invention the mother of necessity. What about people like me who already have a fuel efficient vehicle? Where is our savings? He already made it clear that we should not complain about high gas prices if we are getting bad mileage. I get 32mpg in a Jeep, can I complain?
Perhaps my favorite part of this story is the fact that he has put together a task force to get to the bottom of these skyrocketing gas prices and maybe find out whose a** to kick. Ooh, I like a good mystery. Maybe Barack should send the task force over to his Secretary of Energy’s office to get to the bottom of this. In 2008 Secretary Steven Chu said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe”. Maybe Mr. Chu will tell us if he has figured out how to do that yet.
The next stop on the task force’s mission should be looking into the permitorium in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the BP spill, average gas prices have increased by about $1.00 a gallon. The drilling moratorium and the current permitorium have not only destroyed jobs and part of our economy, but have impacted the spike in prices we are seeing. Not even the extra drilling that foreign companies get to do now because of U.S. funds and our increased importation of foreign oil (which we are supposed to be getting off of, by the way) can stop the price increase that we are now seeing.
Another good thing to look into would be the weakening of the U.S. dollar. Oil prices use the dollar so it just makes sense that with a weaker dollar comes higher prices. This also helps record profits for “Big Oil” come into focus. Obviously if they must charge more, because of the weakened dollar that is pegged to the commodity, then they will have more of those weak dollars. Places like the Fed and the U.S. Treasury would be good places for the task force to pop by. They could ask how those Quantitative Easing (aka printing more money) rounds are going and what effect they are having on the dollar. Maybe they could wait for Wednesday’s Federal reserve press conference to get some answers, but I doubt it. By the way that is a first-ever Federal Reserve press conference, that should tell you how bad things are.
All of these policies have earned our good president a re-design of one of my classics:
