Open Thread: Administration Admits It Doesn't Care About High Gas Prices

March 1st, 2012 10:04 AM

Department of Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted something that conservatives have long suspected about the Obama Administration: It doesn't really care about the skyrocketing cost of energy.

In remarks to a congressional committee, Chu stated that "the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy" when asked if lowering gas prices was the Administration's top goal:

As shocking as his remarks are, they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Chu has a long record of advocating for higher gas prices. In 2008, he stated, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Last March, he reiterated his point in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, noting that his focus is to ease the pain felt by his energy policies by forcing automakers to make more fuel-efficient automobiles. “What I’m doing since I became Secretary of Energy has been quite clear. What I have been doing is developing methods to take the pain out of high gas prices.”

One of those methods is dumping taxpayer dollars into alternative energy projects like the Solyndra solar plant. Another is subsidizing the purchase of high-cost electric cars like the Chevy Volt to the tune of $7,500 per car (which the White House wants to increase to $10,000). In both cases, those methods aren’t working. Solyndra went bankrupt because its product couldn’t bear the weight of market pressures, and Chevy Volts aren’t selling, even with taxpayer-funded rebates. What’s the president’s next plan? Harvesting “a bunch of algae” as a replacement for oil.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is seemingly doing everything it can to make paying for energy even more painful by refusing to open access to the country’s oil and gas reserves and blocking new projects that would lead to the development of more energy in America. Case in point: the president’s decision to say “no” to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would have delivered hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Canada to Texas refineries, while bringing thousands of jobs along with it.

Will Republicans hammer this point in the general election season? Or do you think that Chu's remarks, which echo Obama's earlier comments that he wanted energy costs to "necessarily skyrocket" to make so-called green energy cost-competitive.