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White House seeks to deflect blame over rising gas prices
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Topic Started: Feb 22 2012, 07:12 PM (513 Views)
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Jim Miller
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Feb 22 2012, 07:12 PM
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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White House seeks to deflect blame over rising gas prices
(Reuters) - Under fire from Republicans over rising gasoline prices, the White House on Tuesday highlighted factors beyond its control for gains in global oil markets, as it sought to deflect blame over a potentially damaging election-year issue.
Gas prices, which rose 7 cents a gallon last week, could unsettle economic confidence at a time when the U.S. recovery appears to be gathering pace, hurting President Barack Obama as voters review his track record ahead of the November 6 ballot.
Obama, a Democrat, acknowledged the risk posed by higher gas prices as he welcomed congressional approval of a payroll tax cut extension. The White House later argued that it was unfair to single out the administration over prices at the pump.
"There are no magic solutions to rising oil prices," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. "The rising gas prices clearly the effect of a variety of factors on the global price of oil," he told reporters, citing geopolitical unrest and rapid growth in India and China.
Oil prices touched a nine-month high on Tuesday, partly because Asian consumers moved to cut oil imports from Iran following Western sanctions, and this has already had an impact on forecasts across America.
Gasoline prices advanced last week to $3.59 a gallon from around $3.32 at the start of the year, a rise that helped push up U.S. consumer inflation in January, denting household spending power.
Republicans see gas prices as a way to attack Obama's energy policies as they campaign to deny him a second White House term.
They argue the president sees rising prices as a way to alter U.S. energy consumption, while taking aim at his decision last month to reject TranCanada Corp's proposed Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
"The current unrest in the Middle East reminds us how dependent we are on resources from a volatile region - and how misguided the president's decision to block the Keystone pipeline from Canada really was," said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress.
Pushing back, the White House noted that U.S. domestic energy production was at an eight-year high and said the president's energy policies were helping to reduce the country's dependence on imported foreign oil.
But Obama himself drew attention to the gas price issue. Welcoming congressional approval of an extension of the payroll tax cut, he said earlier on Tuesday the $40 per paycheck that this break was worth would help offset "the rising cost of gas - which is on a lot of people's minds right now."
"The president is very aware of the impact that the global price of oil has on families," Carney told reporters. "The fact that this is happening only underscores the need ... to have a comprehensive energy policy," Carney said. LINK
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Stoney
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Feb 22 2012, 07:15 PM
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We have a comprehensive energy policy. Send billions of dollars to supporters for programs that don't contribute 5% of our energy needs and curtail anything that might enhance our ability to provide more of our own fuel.
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Jim Miller
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Feb 22 2012, 07:15 PM
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Aren't High Gas Prices What Democrats Want? By David Harsanyi
Gas prices are spiking. That's great news, right? We have to wean ourselves off the stuff. At least that's what we've been hearing for years. Oil is dirty. We import it from nations that hate our guts (like Canada!). And moreover, we're running out. Oil is "finite." Finite much in the way water is finite.
So why aren't Democrats making the case that the spike in prices is a good thing? Isn't this basically our energy policy these days? How we "win the future"? If high energy prices were to damage President Barack Obama's re-election prospects, it would be ironic, considering the left has been telling us to set aside our "dependency" -- or, as our most recent Republican president put it, "addiction" -- for a long time.
If Democrats had their way, after all, we would be enjoying the economic results of cap-and-trade policy these days -- a program designed to increase the cost of energy by creating false demand in a fabricated market. As the theory goes, if you inflate the price of fossil fuels, the barbarians might finally start putting thought into how peat moss might be able to power a toaster.
In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama's (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." The president, when asked whether he thought $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy, said, "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment."
How gradual? Like, what, four years? Or is it eight?
Part of "figuring it out" surely had something to do with the recent decision by Obama to nix the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline project that would have pumped 700,000 barrels of oil per day into the United States. More oil just means more excessive, immoral, ugly energy use.
Well, get used to it. You can't take three steps without stepping over some potential 10-billion barrel reserve of dead organisms.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home -- and much more oil around the world.
Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high -- more than $105 a barrel -- after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.
Given the fundability of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we'll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home -- drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.
Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won't stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it's doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we'll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.
Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants. LINK
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Mountainrivers
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Feb 22 2012, 07:19 PM
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- Stoney
- Feb 22 2012, 07:15 PM
We have a comprehensive energy policy. Send billions of dollars to supporters for programs that don't contribute 5% of our energy needs and curtail anything that might enhance our ability to provide more of our own fuel. Have you done any research to try to find out what the Obama administration is doing to increase new energy supplies here in the US?
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Chris
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Feb 22 2012, 09:27 PM
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Well, there was that bit of crony capitalism involving Solyndra.
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Mountainrivers
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Feb 22 2012, 09:29 PM
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- Chris
- Feb 22 2012, 09:27 PM
Well, there was that bit of crony capitalism involving Solyndra. So show us how that was crony capitalism instead of an attempt to promote solar research.
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Chris
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Feb 22 2012, 09:37 PM
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Solyndra loan controversy
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Mountainrivers
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Feb 22 2012, 10:05 PM
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- Chris
- Feb 22 2012, 09:37 PM
"However, neither the Post report nor a batch of e-mails released by the Energy and Commerce Committee in November, 2011 document that politics influenced the loan decision.[34][38]"
So, so far, it's only innuendo?
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Chris
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Feb 22 2012, 10:36 PM
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- Mountainrivers
- Feb 22 2012, 10:05 PM
- Chris
- Feb 22 2012, 09:37 PM
"However, neither the Post report nor a batch of e-mails released by the Energy and Commerce Committee in November, 2011 document that politics influenced the loan decision.[34][38]" So, so far, it's only innuendo? Taking just that line out of context, it's unknown.
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Sea Dog
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Feb 22 2012, 10:47 PM
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Jim, you seldom piss me off, this time you have succeeded!
``We import it from nations that hate our guts (like Canada!).``
To equate Canada and Canadians with people in the middle east, who do hate America, is an insult to Canadians that can only come from paranoia and ignorance`.
Hopefully, the majority of Americans do not share your sentiments, If they do, North America is indeed in trouble!
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