White House adviser claims trajectory of oil and gas prices 'in the right place'
Special presidential energy affairs coordinator Amos Hochstein explains why the Biden administration is touting $4.16 gas when it was $3.18 last year on 'America Reports.'
Biden economic adviser Amos Hochstein was forced to confront the White House's conflicting narratives during an interview on Wednesday when he was asked about the administration's rush to take credit for lower gas prices, despite repeatedly blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin and oil executives when prices were high.
White House officials are touting their efforts to successfully lower gas prices after the national average dropped to $4.16, down from $4.81 last month.
Fox News host John Roberts asked Hochstein during an interview on "America Reports" whether it was fair for administration officials to own the decreasing gasoline prices after spending months blaming Russia for their rise and insisting it was out of their control.
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Fuel prices at a Chevron gas station in Menlo Park, California, on June 9, 2022. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"The war in Ukraine is still raging and prices are coming down. What about the idea that this was Putin’s price hike?" Roberts asked.
Hochstein rejected the suggestion from critics that the Putin war argument was "a fallacy."
"The prices started going up as soon as Putin started intervening in Europe," he said, maintaining that the Russian leader is to blame for scattering global energy markets. "The main increase in prices was when Putin started to intervene in the markets in the early fall of last year, and long before the invasion, when he started increasing the security premiums, those went up."
Hochstein said that the argument that prices were already rising under President Biden prior to Putin's disruption of the markets is "factually not true."
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A sticker of President Biden is placed on a gas pump at an Exxon station in Lakewood, Colorado, on March 9, 2022. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
"Why are they going down if the war is raging? That’s a great question," he said. "The answer is because we’ve actually taken a lot of different actions to bring the prices down. Unfortunately, we live in an era where we want instant gratification that when you take an action you see the reaction immediately — sometimes it takes time in the market."
Hochstein credited Biden's decision to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and engage U.S. allies to pump more oil for the nearly 50 cents per gallon drop over the last 30 days.
"All the actions put together are having that impact," he said. "We want them to go further, but there’s no doubt that the actions we have taken are part of the reason these prices are coming down."
Gas station prices in New Jersey. (Megan Myers/Fox News Digital)
Biden himself touted the fall in prices, calling it "the fastest decline in over a decade" — though critics say the drop itself was negligible because prices are still elevated compared to figures under former President Donald Trump.
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Hochstein said the comparison between gas prices now and what they were a year ago — nearly a dollar less per gallon — is unfair because demand for gas significantly increased once COVID regulations were eased.
"And at the same time," he told Roberts, "I just want to remind you that six weeks ago, most of the headlines in the news were that oil prices were going to go further up and gasoline was going to go up."
While the White House would "like to see them lower," Hochstein said, "there’s no doubt that the trajectory of oil and gasoline prices are in the right place."