Biden: We'll save the polar bears later
The unpopularity of the progressive push for higher gas prices
Heading into Thanksgiving, that spasm of gluttony that kicks off every American’s birthright to over-consume literally everything for a month, stuff is expensive, or impossible to get. People are getting antsy about inflation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests we eat, um, soybeans instead of turkey for Thanksgiving.
Nope, and also do the St. Louis Fed’s board members hold stock in Tofurky?
It’s not only turkey that’s expensive - so is gas. The average price for a gallon of gas on the west coast is just shy of $4.30. That’s heavily influenced by California’s absurdly high gas prices, but they’re high everywhere. Last night, gas at the Fred Meyer in Bend, typically one of the cheapest in town, was $3.76 per gallon.
People are mad about the high gas prices. So, today, Joe Biden announced he would release oil held in the U.S. strategic oil reserve in a putative effort to moderate prices:
It will take time, but before long, you should see the price of gas drop where you fill up your tank. And in the longer term, we will reduce our reliance on oil as we shift to clean energy, but right now, I will do what needs to be done to reduce the price you pay at the pump, from the middle class and working families that are spending much too much and it's a strain, and they’re -- you're the reason I was sent here, to look out for you.
Biden’s remarks point out the tension between his long-term goal to “reduce our reliance on oil as we shift to clean energy” and the immediate need "to do what needs to be done to reduce the price you pay at the pump[.]” He felt the need to address this tension because, presumably, he knew someone would point it out, and he was right. That someone is me, which is good for Biden because usually people don’t pay much attention to what I say*.
High gas prices are a feature, not a bug, for progressives, who currently drive the policy train in Joe Biden’s Democratic Party. Higher prices are one of the key ways they want to speed along the “shift to green energy.” In order to incentivize people to abandon their fossil fuel guzzling rigs for electrical vehicles or, for the truly enlightened, transit, you need to make fossil fuels more expensive and the alternatives less expensive. The Green New Deal, which informed Biden’s infrastructure bill and other measures, would make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive in short order with the goal of reducing carbon emissions and thus, we are to believe, slowing global warming.
Pushing people out of using fossil fuels is Democratic orthodoxy in the states too. Oregon’s cap and trade policy, narrowly rejected by the legislature but implemented in part by Governor Kate Brown’s executive order, seeks to gradually increase the price of fossil fuels, thus discouraging their use. Similarly, California has a host of policies specifically designed to increase the price of gas, and they’ve done a splendid job of that.
Joe Biden et al. tell us repeatedly that climate change is an immediate, existential crisis, and that fixing it requires us to change the way we get around. But when a confluence of market forces and the policies he and other policymakers have instituted to restrict the supply of oil delivers higher prices and a real disincentive to drive and pollute, they take action, however futile and symbolic, to reduce prices.
Biden would like to convince moderate, pocketbook voters that he wants to reduce gas prices while reassuring his progressive base that he actually wants higher gas prices to stop climate change. Maybe he can pull that off, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Have a great Thanksgiving. Go easy on the soybeans!
*However, is it coincidence that the State of Oregon announced it will drop its outdoor mask mandate less than a week after I argued it should do so? I think not. The Oregon Roundup has established residence in your head, Kate Brown.