“While there’s a lot that goes into setting the global oil and gas price,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a news briefing on Monday, “the historic actions taken by President Biden to address the impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have helped and continue to help to increase the global supply of oil and therefore are in the mix of factors driving down the price.”
Republicans say they are surprised the administration is celebrating at all, when prices remain more than $2 a gallon higher than they were when Mr. Biden took office. (They do not mention that he inherited an economy where global demand for oil was suppressed by the coronavirus pandemic.)
It might also seem counterintuitive that the president is encouraging lower gasoline costs while he pursues what aides promise will be an ambitious unilateral agenda to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“The real answer,” Mr. Biden said on Friday, “is to get to a clean-energy economy as soon as possible, turn this into something positive.”
Economists largely agree that raising the prices of fossil fuels like coal and gasoline is a way to ensure that consumers burn less of them and to encourage switching to lower-emission alternatives like electric vehicles. The Energy Department reported on Wednesday that gasoline use in the United States was down nearly 8 percent over the past four weeks compared with the same period a year ago. That continued for the second quarter of the year, which the Energy Information Administration said might have been the result of rising gasoline prices.
But Biden administration officials — even economists who have previously favored steps to raise taxes on fossil fuels — say the high prices are not helping the president’s climate agenda.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/us/politics/biden-gas-prices.html
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