The price of gasoline has risen exponentially in recent days as the price of oil has skyrocketed. That’s the result both of actual supply constraints on the market as well as the fear that future oil supply could be limited. And now President Biden is doing even more to make sure that you have to pay more to fill up at the pump.
President Biden just recently announced a ban on imports of Russian oil and natural gas. That is almost guaranteed to drive up gas prices at the pump, prices which are already nearly double what they were when Biden first took office.
And what has the response been from the Biden administration? When President Biden was asked about gas prices, he said that they’re going to go up, and that there was nothing he could do about it since it was all Russia’s fault. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reiterated his insistence that anyone worried about rising gas prices could just buy an electric car. Because, you know, everyone has a spare $50-100K lying around to buy a Tesla.
The ban on Russian gas and oil is yet another way that the Biden administration is harming US consumers. OPEC has already warned that there is no way its members can step up quickly to replace the loss from Russian oil being cut out of the world market. And Biden himself is making overtures to Venezuela, hardly a friendly, democratic country, to explore the possibility of sourcing more Venezuelan oil.
Meanwhile, we’re supposed to just suck it up and deal with higher gas prices because that’s supposedly a necessary sacrifice to help defeat Russia in Ukraine. But how much more will the Biden administration require us to sacrifice? We could have had the Keystone XL pipeline up and running right now, but Biden shut it down, and he has no plans to allow it to operate. So be prepared to keep paying more money to fill up your car, and remember that it’s President Biden who has been responsible for making gas this expensive.