Palin Vs. '$4-A-Gallon President'

Energy: The former governor of an energy-rich state notes that our president as a candidate did not object to higher gasoline prices but would have preferred "a gradual adjustment." Like a 67% increase?

We recently asked if President Obama actually wanted $8-a-gallon gas, a level reached by Europeans when Steven Chu, now his secretary of energy, said in a September 2008 interview: "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."

Notice he said "boost" and not "allow to rise, or fall, in accordance with the law of supply and demand." Of course, restricting supply is one way to "boost" gas prices, whether by designating oil-rich areas off Alaska as "critical" habitat for an abundant and growing polar bear population or by imposing a de facto moratorium on offshore drilling because one well exploded.

Sharing this view is former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page Tuesday, she said the rise in gasoline prices by 67% in Obama's first two years in office was "no accident." Rather, she said, it was "accomplished through a process of what candidate Obama once called 'gradual adjustment.'"

In a 2008 interview, then-Sen. Obama complained that "we've been consuming energy as if it's infinite." When asked if gas prices, which had briefly spiked under President Bush, would help reduce demand, Obama replied: "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment." He didn't object to higher prices, only to the fact that we use too much energy.

Indeed, candidate Obama, while campaigning in Oregon, said: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK." He added: "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Neither is drilling for more domestic energy. As a result of his de facto moratorium, Palin writes, a "large drilling company was forced to declare bankruptcy, the economy of the region has been hobbled and at least seven rigs moved out of the Gulf area to other parts of the world while many others remain idle."

As a result, production in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to fall by 240,000 barrels a day. Yet in his recent "Pinnochio" press conference, Obama falsely claimed oil "production from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time-high."

Of particular concern to Palin, of course, is the administration's deliberate refusal to exploit Alaska's rich oil and natural gas resources. She notes that it's been five years since Royal Dutch Shell purchased leases to tap reserves in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort seas, but they've "been mired in a regulatory funk courtesy of the Obama administration."

These areas, says the U.S. Geological Survey, contain an estimated 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas. Palin cites a study that says development there would create an annual average of 54,700 jobs nationwide with a $145 billion total payroll and generate an additional $193 billion a year in total revenues to local, state and federal governments for 50 years.

As Steve Everley at American Solutions points out, there's also the matter of 800 billion barrels of oil locked up in shale in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. These shale reserves are triple the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia, proving Obama's press-conference claim that the U.S. has only 2% of the world's oil to be blatantly false.

Prices are rising and will continue to rise, Palin says, because our oil and natural gas "remain locked up because of President Obama's deliberate unwillingness to drill here and drill now." And this is no accident.