Latest Right-Wing Meme: "Biden's Gonna Make Mah Gasoline $5 A Gallon!" Uh, No . . . .

[hatrack]

The theory is that the president-elect's coming efforts to wean the United States off oil will nail people's pocketbooks. Conservative corners of Facebook are filled with viral photos of gas station signs with prices above $5 a gallon. “Just a reminder of what things looked like the last time Biden was in the White House,” reads one image.

But this vastly overstates a president's power to control the cost of a commodity traded on a world market. Although a president's actions — including Biden's climate policies — can nudge the price of oil, the effect is marginal at best, experts say. “The scale of the global oil market,” said Pavel Molchanov, an oil analyst at Raymond James, “is so massive that it would be extremely unlikely for any single political decision, anywhere in the world, to materially affect oil prices.”

As Trump likes to brag, gas prices — currently a little above $2 a gallon nationally — indeed have been down during the last year of his term. But that's because the coronavirus pandemic has devastated demand for oil as people everywhere fly and drive less often. Although prices recovered a bit over the summer, things got so bad in April that the price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude briefly went negative for the first time ever.

Biden wants a “transition” away from oil. But that will have a mixed effect on the petroleum prices. The former vice president is planning to reorient the government toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions and moving toward cleaner sources of energy. One way he will do that is through tighter rules on leaks of methane from wells and restrictions on drilling on federal lands. Those new regulations may squeeze oil supply and lift gas prices. “Perhaps in a couple of years, depending on Biden's policy, there could be more an impact than there will be when he takes office,” said Patrick DeHaan, an oil analyst at GasBuddy.com.

EDIT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/12/energy-202-conservatives-predict-gas-prices-will-spike-under-biden-experts-say-those-fears-are-overblown/

[no_hypocrisy]

1. That was George W. Bush.

I know b/c I remember paying it.