Fuel Prices

As a follow up to my earlier post about high oil prices; I caught this on Powerline before the internet went out earlier in the week.  It's a great synopsis of why I dislike politicians and the Democratic ones in particular.  They're nearly all style-over-substance reactionaries.  They did nothing about ensuring that the US had a stable energy future (in fact, generally the opposite) when it would have made a difference and now that it is largely too late to do anything that will help us in the near future, they hold meaningless hearings to beat their chests and posture.  Pathetic.

In the linked story, one of the Congressmen does have a good line when he mentions that the oil companies have a lower approval rating than Congress and "that means they're down low."  One thing that isn't mentioned in this assessment of Congresses theatrics is that the cost of fuel is significantly increased by the fact that the oil industry has been blocked from building a single newer, more efficient refinery since the 70's.  Thanks for that, Congress.

From Powerline:

Today House Democrats appealed to ignorance, in their usual fashion, by summoning executives from the five biggest oil companies to berate them for high gasoline prices. This is fundamentally stupid in at least two respects.

First, these same Democrats purport to be worried about "global warming" and committed to taking strong measures to combat it. Needless to say, the simplest way to reduce carbon consumption, if you really believe that carbon consumption will cause an environmental disaster, is to increase the price of energy. This is why some honest global warming advocates have argued for huge increases in the gasoline tax. Conversely, if the price of gasoline were to decline as House Democrats said they wanted today, the result would be increased consumption and increased carbon emissions. If the Democrats aren't willing to pay the price to reduce energy consumption (i.e., higher gasoline prices), they should quit yammering about global warming and admit they knew all along that the alarmism was BS.

Second, if you really want the price of gasoline to fall, there is only one way to achieve that goal: increase supply. Yet these very same Democrats have made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to do so. Had Bill Clinton not vetoed oil development in northern Alaska, enormous amounts of oil would now be flowing to American consumers, reducing the price of gasoline for everyone. Further, as one of the oil executives pointed out today, 85% of our coastline is off-limits to drilling.

In short, pretty much every policy that the Democrats have pursued for the last three decades has contributed to the shortage of oil, and resulting high price of gasoline. For the Democrats to pretend that high prices are the fault of the oil companies--which, unlike the Democrats, actually go to great lengths to bring energy to American consumers--is beyond hypocrisy.