Prices at the Pumps are Rising, But Don’t Worry – Politicians Say it’s All Good
Politicians have no problem letting us bear the brunt of whatever decisions they make, whether we agree or not
One thing about politicians: They enjoy making decisions and then informing us that we’ll have to suffer a little bit. For the good of whatever they decided is important.
In this case, President Biden has decided that Russia must be punished, and it’s likely going to affect us at the gas pump.
As you may know, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been threatening to take over parts of eastern Ukraine, just like he took over Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 (when Biden was vice president; do you think there’s a common denominator there?).
Now, Putin is obviously a dictator and we don’t want dictators just taking over other countries willy-nilly. But Ukraine is hardly a lily-white country – they’re routinely classified as one of the most corrupt countries in all of Europe. It’s hard to pick the good guy in this.
Nevertheless, President Biden, who has left our southern border open to everyone, has indefinitely jailed people who wandered through the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has fired health care workers and military personnel for not surrendering to his vaccine mandates, now assures us that we must take action against the politically oppressive Putin and keep him from crossing Ukraine’s sacrosanct border.
To defend Ukraine’s honor Biden and his spokesperson, Jen Psaki, have told us that it’ll cost us. That’s just the price for the freedom we all hold dear.
We’ll have to wait and see if this turns into a full-fledged war. A survey of all adults showed just 26 percent favor us playing a major role in the conflict, and 32 percent of Democrats feel that way.
More Money at the Pumps
So what does all of this have to do with how much money you’re going to have to shell out at Shell when you fill up your car?
Well, we are an oil-guzzling nation, consuming more than 17 million barrels per day (BPD). Barrels contain 42 gallons of oil which converts to about 19 gallons of gasoline. Besides gasoline, crude oil is also refined into other gas products like kerosene, and is an ingredient in a wide variety of products, including crayons and Tupperware.
But we’re not too worried about how much we spend on crayons and plastic containers; we care about the price of gas at the pump.
Under President Trump, the United States produced enough oil to not only meet our needs here but also to export it to other countries. But one of the first acts of President Biden was to close the Keystone pipeline and limit such activities as fracking. Now we have to import 8.5 million BPD. We get nearly two-thirds of that from Canada and Mexico.
Wait, so what does this have to do with Russia?
Russia produces a lot of oil, second only to the United States, and we import 595,000 BPD from Russia – yes, we buy oil from our sworn enemy – more than we get from Saudi Arabia. President Biden has asked Saudi Arabia to increase its export amount but so far they’ve refused.
What we get from Russia amounts to about 7 percent of our total. That doesn’t seem like much but if that were cut off, it would hurt. Think about having your paycheck reduced by 7 percent – you could still probably make ends meet, but you’d feel it.
A barrel of oil has a varied range of costs, depending on the type and where it comes from, but most of it currently ranges from $91 to $97 per barrel; this morning the average was $91.66 (when Trump left office it was $52.20). This morning the nationwide average price of a gallon of gas was $3.53 ($2.38 on Trump’s last day), but that varies from state to state, depending on the state’s gas taxes – from $3.17 in Oklahoma to $4.74 in California, according to GasBuddy.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine could increase the cost of a barrel of oil by $5 to $20, according to various estimates (President Trump has said it could go as high as $200 per barrel). I’m no math whiz, but I think that would result in average per gallon costs of $3.70 to $4.25 ($7.26 if Trump is right!).
Of course, if the conflict causes us to stop buying from Russia and we can’t make up the difference elsewhere, we’ll have shortages and who knows what that will do to prices.
A fill-up of just an average tank is about $15-20 more than it was a year ago. That will surely rise in the next few months. But Biden and his spokespeople assure us that’s just the cost we have to bear in order to support Ukraine in their fight against Russian aggression. Politicians are always so willing to let us suffer for their decisions.
This is Bigger Than Just War and Gas
But I believe there’s something bigger at play here. It’s about climate change and ultimately about power.
For the past year Biden and left have been pushing the threat of climate change (don’t ask them for a definition of that because they’ll just call you a science denier). That’s why our own oil production decreased. It’s why we hear over and over about green energy. They push electric vehicles – California has decreed all new vehicle purchases must be EV by 2030 – neglecting to tell us how much fossil fuel will be burned to produce the electricity to charge them.
We’ve just come out of a period of government control over our lives because of a virus. Mask and vaccine mandates are gone in all but a few pockets of blue states, but the officials took note of how easily we obeyed.
So it would certainly be easy for them to start controlling our fuel consumption. I’ve already seen one article where an official said if things get too bad we may have to curtail our driving only to essentials like buying groceries and going to work. That could include pump limits on how many gallons we could buy.
And now that we’ve seen from Canada’s example how quickly a government can shut down the finances of anyone who disobeys, the politicians wield a big stick to make us toe the line.
Perhaps I’m just cynical, or I’m reading too much into what’s going on. But you have to admit, after the past two years, it’s certainly a possibility.