Obama Was Wrong. We Were Right

by Newt Gingrich: One of the more amusing periods of the 2012 presidential campaign season was the 6 weeks President Obama, the White House, the news media, and most of the Washington elite spent insisting that more oil and gas production in the United States would not put downward pressure on gasoline prices.

At the time, many Americans were paying more than $4 a gallon to fill up their cars, and they were rightly unhappy about it. I argued that $2.50 a gallon gasoline was achievable if we stopped artificially restricting American energy. The astonishing improvements in the technology of oil production, I predicted, had the potential to dramatically increase the supply of oil and reduce the cost of gasoline at the pump. By refusing to allow more drilling on millions of acres of federal lands the American people own, President Obama was keeping the price of gasoline unnecessarily high.

Outside of the heat of a presidential campaign, this observation of reality and suggestion of basic economics probably would not have provoked such rabid protest, indignation, and accusations of ignorance and malice. With gasoline over $4 a gallon in an election year, however, the idea was a serious threat to the President’s popularity.

President Obama responded by embarking on a month-long energy tour insisting he could do nothing to affect gasoline prices and promising that exotic alternatives were just around the corner.

“The next time you hear some politician trotting out some three-point plan for $2 gas, you let them know, we know better,” the President told a crowd in North Carolina. “Tell them we’re tired of hearing phony election-year promises that never come about.”

The White House went so far as to say I was “lying” that $2.50 a gallon gas was achievable.

Pinocchio-wielding “journalists” in the business of “fact checking” opinions and value judgements managed to find a prediction about the future to be “false” years ahead of time.

The press tracked down dozens of supposed experts to explain that I “didn’t know what I was talking about,” that “only a depression” would bring gasoline prices down to $2.50 a gallon, and that “if we drilled in the middle of Manhattan and everybody drilled in their backyard we would not have enough oil to move the global market.”

When they all work together, the Washington elites can be amazingly effective at denying reality for a few weeks. Sometimes even for a few years. But eventually reality intrudes. Events have tested the proposal that dramatically increasing the available supply of oil puts downward pressure on prices, and, unsurprisingly, it turned out the environmental left was wrong.

By next year, U.S. oil production will be almost double what is was in 2008 and the highest since 1972, due in large part to breakthroughs in drilling technology that make it possible to extract energy previously thought unrecoverable.

As even Slate pointed out recently, prices have responded. According to AAA, the average gas price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline this week was $2.89. It is forecast to continue falling.

A friend recently sent me this photo from a gas station at the Costco near his home in Richmond, Virginia:

We managed to achieve $2.50 a gallon gasoline (or at least well below $3) without entering a depression or drilling in the middle of Manhattan in everybody’s backyards.

We also managed to achieve it without help from President Obama, who has continued to block increased leasing of federal lands. Virtually all of the increase in production has come on private lands the President can’t directly control. Just imagine what the price of gasoline might be today if we had a President who actually wanted to lessen this significant cost for millions of Americans.

President Obama and those who oppose greater American energy production should tell us why they’re still refusing to allow more drilling, now that markets, innovation, and simple economics have proved to work on gasoline prices just as they work everywhere else.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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