This morning, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas is $4.86 — which is almost 60 cents per gallon higher than it was a month ago, at $4.27. The price a year ago was $3.06.
For perspective, before this surge, the previous highest price in the Energy Information Administration records was $4.11, in July 2008. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be $5.52.)
This weekend, Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg tried to make two contradictory arguments simultaneously. The first was an obliteration of a straw man, declaring that “We know that the price of gasoline is not set by a dial in the Oval Office.”
The second was an insistence that President Biden’s energy policies had worked well:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Earlier this year the president tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which hasn’t made any difference at all. Was that a failure?
BUTTIGEIG: Well, look, I don’t think it’s correct to say it hasn’t made any difference at all. This is an action that helped to stabilize global oil prices. The action the president took around ethanol, introducing additional flexibility there, that’s having an effect on prices in the Midwest.
Those “prices in the Midwest” are marginally better than the rest of the country, but those prices also largely reflect factors such as state gas taxes and proximity to refineries and gas pipelines.
Back in November, when President Biden announced the release of 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, his statement pledged the release would helps provide relief to Americans immediately:
The U.S. Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in two ways:
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32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, releasing oil that will eventually return to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the years ahead. The exchange is a tool matched to today’s specific economic environment, where markets expect future oil prices to be lower than they are today, and helps provide relief to Americans immediately and bridge to that period of expected lower oil prices. [Emphasis added.]
By December, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee offered a tweet praising President Joe Biden for lowering gas prices, sharing a graph that had no start date showing gas prices going down by two cents from November 22 to November 29, from $3.40 to $3.38. It was a laughable attempt to hype a miniscule and short-lived decline, one that most consumers probably never noticed.
A word that never came up in Buttigieg’s conversation with Stephanopolous: “Refinery.”