As usual, when the topic morphs to energy supplies, prices and oil companies, many on this board resorts to their own quiver of arrows, which still end up missing the mark.
Try these out, from the helpful R-Squared blog -
Why Bill O'Reilly's Gasoline Price Solution Won't Work
President Obama's Role in Current Gasoline Prices
Read some of the comments too, where Rapier and others will help to shoot down what might be some of your own conspiracy theories-du-jour.
Oh, and this isn't just a Republican bashing thing, because Obama doesn't get to take credit for increasing oil production either.
If President Obama is not responsible for current gas prices because of the lag time it takes for policies to have an impact and for projects to get implemented, then he is also not responsible for the current uptick in domestic oil and natural gas production. So you can’t have it both ways: If you want to give him credit for higher oil production, you can’t then dodge blame for higher gas prices. Either he owns both or he owns neither. And in fact, he owns neither.
So what then is the president’s role as far as gas prices or oil production? At best we can say that the policies a president puts in place today can make some impact on the markets in a few years. So five years from now we may be lamenting or praising President Obama’s energy policy decisions. We can of course speculate on how they may turn out. His policies may ultimately hurt supplies and raise prices, but they have no bearing on today’s gas prices. In reality, due to the increasing importance of consumers in developing countries, even long-term there isn’t a lot that a U.S. president is going to be able to do to impact prices. Obama could put policies in place that increase supplies, but that won’t necessarily result in cheap gasoline.
See also
this. Seems that the rising domestic production has been due to private company operations, not government efforts
The increase in domestic drilling was almost entirely in areas for which the Obama administration exercised no authority, as oil production on federal land declined by 11 percent in fiscal year 2011, according to a study by the Institute on Energy Research (IER), a free-market energy think tank. But oil production on state lands increased that year by 14 percent and increased by 12 percent on private lands.
“A lot of the wells that were supposed to be drilled weren’t because of the moratorium,” Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the IER, told CNSNews.com. “Drilling is up in the U.S. on lands he has no say over. On lands he has all the say over, drilling is down.” …
oh, and if you agree with Sen. Markey et.al. that we ought to run out and tap the Strategic Petroleum Resrve right away to solve our gas price problems, you might want to read over some of the links at Rapier's Consumer Energy Report blog
linked here.