Biden Expands Effort to Lower Gas Prices and Secure Energy Independence
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, right, talks to David Koch before a luncheon meeting at Manhattan’s City Hall, Sunday, June 14, 2007, in New York. Obama met Monday with his fellow Democratic presidential candidates over lunch in midtown Manhattan.
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
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Originally published on March 31, 2008 8:02 pm
Today, the energy industry is reeling from the worst natural-gas shortage in decades. It was announced a few weeks ago that gas prices will go up. The country’s big oil companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil, are among those now in full opposition.
We wondered if President Obama, one of the nation’s top advocates of alternative energy like wind and solar power, would expand his efforts to lower gas prices and guarantee energy independence.
So we called him to talk about it.
Evan Vucci: The energy industry has been very hostile for some time to the notion that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by any significant means, and they have tried to do everything under the sun, except for cutting the price of gas.
The price of oil has been going up. We have had a shortage in 2008, and it may be that much worse next year because of increased demand from, say, India. So what are your plans to combat this?
Barack Obama: Well, you look at three areas. One is a very real problem, which is natural gas prices. The thing that most people don’t know about the American energy situation is that, for natural gas, a gallon of gas is only about $4 instead of about $10.
Now, you can drill oil in America, but you don’t get the price of $4 for a gallon. So what we have is a very serious problem with prices.
The second thing is renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, which we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on, and yet we have
