I've said before that it is a fundamental error to understand electoral politics as a mechanism for translating voters' desires into policy. There are some structural reasons why it just doesn't work that way, most fundamentally that to the extent voters have policy preferences at all, they are mixed up in all sorts of combinations, and particular ones have different salience for each voter. The paradigmatic example is that while a substantial majority of Americans favor legal abortion, for most of them the issue doesn't decide their vote; while for a minority it's all important. That's why support for a minority position can be a winning strategy for some politicians.
But the fact is that most voters don't understand how public policy affects their lives. Whether abortion is legal or not is straightforward, but why someone has trouble making ends meet is complicated. The party in power, and the president in particular, gets credit or blame for circumstances that are largely or entirely out of their control. An excellent example right now is the price of gasoline. The price of gas right now is actually not high by historic standards -- it's lower than it was in 2014. But people don't remember that, they only compare it to the pandemic low. The price of gas actually started to rise in mid-2020, and it just continued after Biden took office. The increase has absolutely nothing to do with any policy of the United States government, certainly not anything that changed in January 2021.
Gasoline prices have been rising because crude oil prices have been rising, with a slight additional contribution from the closure of refineries. Crude oil prices have been rising because oil producers have not increased production fast enough to keep up with the increase in demand since the pandemic low. The threat of conflict over Ukraine has also contributed to rising prices recently, as Russia is a major oil producer. The price of gasoline has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden. He is actually working to bring prices down by encouraging nations to increase production and possibly releasing some supplies from the strategic petroleum reserve. But as Andrew Gross of the American Automobile Association says:
There are not a lot of tools that any administration, either Republican or Democrat, can [use], just because so much of what we pay at the pump is wrapped up in the price of oil. That shows the pickle we're in, because we are so fossil-fuel dependent.
Right. So we need to stop using gasoline at all. That's the only solution in the long term. And Biden wanted to make real progress toward that goal, but the Republicans and Manchinema wouldn't let him.
Update: This should be a fairly obvious point, but oil traders buy oil in order to sell it now, not six years in the future. Nobody is going to buy oil with the intention of storing it for several years before they sell it. The possible war in Ukraine might happen tomorrow.
Update 2: The United States is a net exporter of petroleum, or to be more precise of petroleum and petroleum products. Nothing has changed. Oil is sold on a global market and it is on the global market that the price is set.
3 comments:
You may agree with Joe Biden's policies of restricting the exploration and production of oil, but there is little doubt that his policies played an important part in the rapidly rising price.
In his first couple of months in office these are some of the first steps he took:
Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline
Restricting drilling in parts of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and federal lands
Placing a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal land
Rescinding energy production leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Plans to close nearly half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska
Stringent new regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas production
Classifying residual water from oil and gas drilling as toxic waste
Considering hiking royalties paid to the federal government by fossil-fuel companies.
Then there was the elimination of tax deductions for the producers that further increased cost of production.
The US has some of the most abundant oil reserves in the world and there is no doubt this administration can take steps to increase production to lower the price of oil.
Will he?
I think Biden's between a rock and a hard place in that climate change and diminishing the use of fossil fuels was the center piece of his presidential campaign.
That's 99% bullshit. None of those actions has any affect on the current price of crude oil. They may affect the supply of petroleum some years in the future, but that's good, because yes, we do need to essentially eliminate use of fossil fuel. As far as the current price, all of that is totally irrelevant.
My God, is this actually how R voters think it works? No wonder we're doomed.
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