Republicans are going to try to make high gas prices an issue in the 2022 election.
In Maine, we recently saw former Gov. Paul LePage and former 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin pumping gas in Bangor, as part of their races to reclaim their old jobs.
LePage told reporters that Democrats are intentionally increasing gas prices because they want people to buy electric cars, the kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory we expect from him.
There is no American official who can make the price of gasoline go up or down. No matter where its drilled, oil is a commodity traded on a global market and its price is subject to conditions that are out of our government’s control.
Even though the United States produces more gas and oil than we use, we are still affected. Political upheaval in the Persian Gulf will cause heating oil prices to spike in Perry, Maine.
Gas prices are volatile. What we are seeing now is a predictable result of the COVID pandemic, which initially threw the economy into the deepest recession since the end of World War II, followed by a rapid recovery.
When people all over the world were told to stay home, the price of oil collapsed and so did oil production. When demand came roaring back, short supply led to higher prices. As production started picking up, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting a war between two oil producing countries. Between disruption to their petroleum industries and sanctions against Russia, there is less supply to meet global demand, driving up prices even more.
President Biden would lower gas prices if he had the power, and so would Maine’s governor, Janet Mills – for political reasons alone – but they can’t. They just have the bad luck of being in office when a series of world-wide crises are creating wild swings in the global energy market.
You can tell that LePage and Poliquin are not serious about stabilizing energy costs by their lack of a plan to do anything about them. Republicans in Washington claim we can drill our way to lower prices.
But we would need to increase domestic productions by 60 percent – about 7 million barrels a day – to make up for what Russia had been selling to our European allies, and oil companies won’t do that if it will make the price go down. Meanwhile, LePage has made vague comments about cutting Maine’s 30-cent-per-gallon gas tax, which is used for highway maintenance. Even if he eliminated the tax, Maine motorists would only save a few dollars a month at a time when gas costs more than $4 a gallon.
If the Republicans were really serious about stabilizing energy costs, they would be the ones advocating for more investment in clean-energy infrastructure to transition the United States away from fossil fuels.
If most cars and home heating systems were electric, and the electricity came from renewable sources, we would not be subject to the whims of war or weather. The high upfront costs of an EV or a heat pump could be predictably spread out over time and not subject to international events.
That’s not going to happen without a major investment in public infrastructure, which would include modernizing the power grid, building out vehicle charging stations and advancing energy storage technology.
None of these are easy fixes or overnight solutions, but that is what we should be doing if we really want to put energy price shocks in our rearview mirrors.
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