Friday, January 13, 2012

Mission Accomplished!

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, [energy prices] would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was... [t]hey will pass that money on to consumers." --Barack Obama, 1 November 2008

Mission accomplished.

This graph depicts gas prices since the inauguration of Barack H. Obama.

After years of searching, I've finally discovered a campaign promise that Obama actually followed through with.


2 comments:

A Conservative Teacher said...

Doug, to be honest you can take that gasbuddy chart back 6 years, and it looks like Bush had some high gas prices too when he was President from 2006-2008. I wish it went back further, but from the basis of those 3 years compared against Obama's 3, it does not appear Obama is considerably worse for gas prices, especially when inflation is factored in.

What it does appear is that whereas under Bush gas prices went up or down, under Obama it appears to be floating to a new normal which is on average higher than Bush. Whether that average is in excess of Bush is beyond my abilities to figure out.

I'll also point out that under Bush we brought a lot more production and exploration of oil, and that those projects take years sometimes to actually start producing. Obama here could be benefiting from Bush's actions.

Anonymous said...

Prices went up to ove 4 bucks a gallon in the period preceding the 2008 presidential elections, then dropped precipitously to under two bucks a gallon just after.

I've read several places that the up-surge in prices was due to manipulation of the gasoline futures market, intended to raise the price to the misery level (as well as make money for the speculators), to help ensure a Republican didn't get elected president (those evil Republicans are just profiteering on oil, they don't care how much we hurt). Don't know what truth there is to that.

This chart http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html goes back beyond what gasbuddy has.