Energy: When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.
Already, pump prices are higher than they've been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.
President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.
"Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic," Gibbs said Sunday. "Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we're making progress."
"Progress" isn't exactly how Obama described the country's energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of "Washington's failure to lead on energy," which was "turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans."
"For the well-off in this country," Obama said in May 2008, "high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they're a huge problem, bordering on a crisis."
In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be "one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced" and that gas prices "are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses."
While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama's policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.
Obama, in fact, has made it clear for years that he has no real interest in boosting domestic production.
When President Bush announced plans in 2008 to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, Obama dismissed it, saying "it would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for 30 years."
"Offshore drilling," he said, "would not lower gas prices today, it would not lower gas prices next year and it would not lower gas prices five years from now."
In a big energy speech he gave in August 2008, Obama argued that "if we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only 3% of the world's oil reserves."
And while in office, Obama's done everything he can to limit production — slow-walking offshore permits, killing the Keystone XL pipeline, making it even harder to get oil out of federal lands.
Instead of aggressively expanding oil production, he offered a set of ridiculous alternatives — hugely wasteful "green" energy subsidies, a call for a million electric cars by 2014 and costly fuel economy mandates that won't make a dent in consumption for decades.
With gas prices up 93% since Obama took office, we're seeing just how well this approach works.
http://news.investors.com/article/601827/201202211837/obama-shifting-talk-on-high-gas-prices.htm
Already, pump prices are higher than they've been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.
President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.
"Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic," Gibbs said Sunday. "Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we're making progress."
"Progress" isn't exactly how Obama described the country's energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of "Washington's failure to lead on energy," which was "turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans."
"For the well-off in this country," Obama said in May 2008, "high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they're a huge problem, bordering on a crisis."
In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be "one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced" and that gas prices "are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses."
While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama's policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.
When President Bush announced plans in 2008 to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, Obama dismissed it, saying "it would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for 30 years."
"Offshore drilling," he said, "would not lower gas prices today, it would not lower gas prices next year and it would not lower gas prices five years from now."
In a big energy speech he gave in August 2008, Obama argued that "if we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only 3% of the world's oil reserves."
And while in office, Obama's done everything he can to limit production — slow-walking offshore permits, killing the Keystone XL pipeline, making it even harder to get oil out of federal lands.
Instead of aggressively expanding oil production, he offered a set of ridiculous alternatives — hugely wasteful "green" energy subsidies, a call for a million electric cars by 2014 and costly fuel economy mandates that won't make a dent in consumption for decades.
With gas prices up 93% since Obama took office, we're seeing just how well this approach works.
http://news.investors.com/article/601827/201202211837/obama-shifting-talk-on-high-gas-prices.htm
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