I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama’s Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete. I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down. I left out a couple other reasons, though.
First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don’t think higher gas prices are a bad thing. Ideologically, they’re committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they’ve been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they’re all in favor of gas prices going up. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be pushing their “cap and trade” bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who’s leading the charge on this, hasn’t even read) so hard; after all, let’s call a spade a spade here, what is this thing? It’s an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they’ll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it’s going to boost the price of gas even more.
Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez. It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America). As such, they’re going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer. It’s an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about “the useful idiots in the White House.”