Mechanics and engineers give all kinds of advice on improving fuel economy, such as replacing spark plugs, filters and speed reduction. Eighty-one days from this posting, there is one thing all drivers can do collectively to reduce the price of motor fuel. It’s not too hard to figure out what it is.
World oil prices have MUCH more to do with gas prices than who’s in the White House. They’re driven by supply and demand. Thank goodness we’re NOW producing record volumes of oil!
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This will go off the rails . There are more important things at stake then fuel prices.
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I just had a long conversation with someone who thinks that gasoline prices are what they are because of what a US president does.
This was fortunate for me. Because I had some oceanfront property in Arizona that I needed to unload, and this person paid a premium for it.
There was also some manner of conversation about the earth being flat in the midst of this.
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It is also square . 
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I thought everyone knows the earth is a cube spinning so fast it appears to be a sphere. 
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What if the president of a large oil producing country issued a series of executive orders restricting oil exploration in that country? This tells every other world oil competitor the supply from that country will likely drop.
Future supply will drop. Demand stays the same or most likely increase. Wouldn’t the theory of supply and demand cause a rapid increase in the cost of oil from those competitors?
But our oil production is increasing, making records. There have not been significant restrictions.
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It’s a nice counterfactual that does not apply to anything that has happened with US gasoline prices. US oil production is at record highs, even while Biden is president. They don’t want to brag about it b/c it doesn’t play well with the environmental progressives. The Repubs don’t want to talk about it b/c it eliminates another fake “talking point” to fire up their mis-informed populist base.
And by the same respect, neither want to play up that fact that oil production soared while Obama was president - but NOT because of Obama (just like today’s boom isn’t because of Biden). The key during the Obama years was, of course, innovations in drilling and hydraulic fracturing that started during the last part of the GWB years, and continued on after GWB left office). Interpreting energy markets by who is the US president is bizarre if you know how they work.
So on to the Trump myth. A lot of people think Trump made the US “energy independent” - you know, “drill baby drill” (which I think goes back to the hollow-headed Sarah Palin). But a) “energy independence” in global markets is a fake concept and b) if the issue is US oil produced vs consumed, then we were already “energy independent” before Trump took office.
So then we come to “but gas prices under Trump…” This is a brainless echo the pandemic. Oil was trading in negative territory in mid-2020 due to pandemic restrictions - you know, negative territory, as in suppliers were PAYING buyers to take excess inventory off of their hands. That was during the last part of the Trump years. Lots of oil production was taken offline. You know - Econ 101 I think it’s called - ?
Then there was the surprisingly strong economic rebound. Demand for gasoline plummeted in mid-2020, and then surged. What does ECON 101 tell us now about surging demand with slack in supply?
In other words…PRESIDENTS DON’T CONTROL ENERGY MARKETS. And while policy decisions can matter in some ways, what happened in the pandemic/post-pandemic era (regardless of how anyone feels about that) had as much to do with the US president as the flat world does with the movement of ocean tides.
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My daughter and I were recently in the Houston/Galveston, TX area. We could see many of the oil refineries in the distance. I told her what they were, and how it was unlikely the refineries would ever close, or ever be expanded, due to environmental laws. I firmly believe that oil will remain through the rest of my lifetime, and into hers as well. It’s just too useful and cheap not to use.
Having said that… I think we can use less oil and fossil fuels, and we’ve been using less of it in my lifetime due to efficiencies and alternatives.
Also agree that the US president has no ability to directly influence oil prices. No president can simply “turn a spigot” and tell Exxon to start pumping more gasoline into the national supply. And any president that tells you that is full of…cow patties.
Getting this back to car stuff… I’ve been rather intrigued as of late with Toyota doubling down on their hybrid technology, as opposed to pure EV cars. I myself have been on the fence about going with a hybrid vs a pure EV. The hybrid certainly seems like the safer, more practical option for my life circumstances. Toyota is not a stupid car company, so you can bet that their firm stance is backed by firm data. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.
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Doubling the advertising?
My comment was a hypothetical example of how a Chief Executive (or legislature) can have a direct affect on the price of gasoline, or anything else, for that matter but you wanted to enter the realm of US reality, so…
Based on this article…The President signed 27 executive orders
https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-makes-sweeping-changes-oil-and-gas-policy
And then oil prices… Notice the rise past Jan 2021 when many states were still “closed”. demand ramped back up to those states that re-opened.
And the same for the price of gas…
The price of oil and gas shot up pretty quickly after 27 EOs.
Demand was still lower due to “work from home” than pre-pandemic. Yet the price of gas and oil still continued to rise and has stayed stubbornly high.
The article above shows there have been significant restrictions… however, the administration backed away from many of them as well as open up the federal gas reserves when gas prices stayed high due to geo-political actions.
See below.
Other than the EV shared with Subaru they have moved most of the linup to hybrid or a hybrid option. We’ve had a Prius in the family for just over 15yrs now and the Prius Prime is on the consideration list for a future purchase but the regular Prius has met the daily needs very well while giving the ability to take a 300+ mile trip a few times a year. Toyota’s had the best track record for Hybrid’s and I couldn’t give an accurate count of how many Toyota Hybrid owner’s we know. You may end up never replacing the brake pads depending on your driving style.
Okay, we have the plot, now we need the script for this Nicolas Cage movie.
As long as customers buy them, Toyota will build them. As the leader in hybrid sales, we should expect them to continue building as many as they can sell. By doing this they don’t incur the expenses of building big batteries for BEVs and the motors required to move the cars.
The auto industry isn’t ready to move to wholesale replacement of ICE cars with BEVs for a number of reasons. Range is one issue. Some have good range like the Tesla Long Range Model 3 with a 360 mile range. It’s also the least expensive Tesla with the federal tax credit included. Charging infrastructure has come a long way, at least where I am, and it still needs to grow more, especially in Mid-America. Safer battery technologies would go a long way towards gaining wider acceptance. I’m happy enough with the LFP battery cell safety and Tesla’s charge monitoring system that I’ll continue to charge in my garage. I expect that we need one or two new generations of battery technology before BEVs are ready for widespread acceptance. I will say though that I see a ton of Tesla M3s and MYs in my area.
This OP should never have been made as it is an obvious political one, and if I were a mod I would have taken it down. That said, I’m not a flagger except for obvious spam (tho’ this OP was close). So the mods will do what they will. I’ll say just a few things and then I’m done with it.
Right - that’s basically what a counterfactual is. It doesn’t mean “contrary to the facts” or something like that. It roughly just means “let’s suppose for the sake of argument…”
Even so, you didn’t mean it as a hypothetical as your follow-up post makes quite clear. You think that Biden’s executive orders caused the rise and spike of gas prices.
That’s fine. You read these kinds of things through politics. That is obvious, and you can do it that way if you like. Your charts and observations on them are unconvincing though, if we want the “it’s Biden’s fault” argument as oil / gas prices started rising before Trump left office. Here are some other things that happened around all of that “executive order” and price rise stuff - my well line sprang a leak, I stubbed my toe, and - oh, right - Russia invaded the Ukraine. (The silence on that minor point is pretty telling).
Actually, on that note, if you do want to blame some oil/gas price rise on Biden, then it would be for the ban on importing Russian oil after that invasion. But the prices were going to spike anyway.
The price of oil/gas are not currently “stubbornly high” - a statement that goes directly against your admission that production numbers from US fields are at all time highs - and whatever reasons behind that might exist are not relevant to the fact that production is doing just fine.
I already know that you will continue to read these things through “Biden did it.” Have at it. My comments have spanned presidents fluidly because I know thay US presidents (short of starting major wars) have precious little to do with oil/gas prices.
LOL. I had that convo with by brother a couple of years ago when we were in the thick of the price rises (including Russia/Ukraine). He couldn’t explain to me (and still hasn’t) how the cancellation of a a pipeline that didn’t exist could possibly have affected oil/gas prices. There was no pipeline. It was a permit cancellation. Please explain to me how a pipeline that doesn’t exist affects global oil supply?
Yet another story from politics rather than reality. If you want to talk about the effects of the Keystone XL, you’ll need to come back in another 5 years (when it hypothetically might have actually been finished and been operational). Even then, you’ll have to explain how Canadian tar sands oil fits into the domestic US energy market in terms of making for great prices at the pump. (P.S. / spoiler: it’s largely meaningless).
I’m out. Have a field day with it.
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Nearly flagged you! Out of guidelines and you know it!
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I flagged it. We were doing a pretty good job discussing the car-related impact of politics on oil and gas prices, then that. Oh, well.
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Well you jumped right in but explain why it was necessary to drain the strategic reserve?
The XL pipeline will connect US oil to Canadian ports to the world market. How will that reduce fuel prices for US?