1) Oil and gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918. Or the past 150 years:
The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.
2) Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama:
This statement is true, though it’s incomplete — which hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the standard GOP stump speech on energy policy. The pre-Obama era was no low-gas-price utopia either, and prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.
3) U.S. oil and gas production is way down under Obama. Or way up:
Here, the two parties sound like they live in separate universes. On federal lands and federal offshore waters, oil production fell sharply last year, partly because of the after-effects of the BP spill — but was still 12 percent higher than before Obama became president.
Natural gas production, meanwhile has soared to the highest levels ever, mainly because of the industry’s success in extracting previously unimagined quantities from shale reserves on private and state-owned lands.
The production numbers, drops in fuel demand and improvements in energy efficiency have caused U.S. reliance on petroleum imports to shrink to their lowest levels since the late 1990s
4) Watergate-gate:
D.C.-area residents are familiar with the insanely high prices of the Exxon station at the Watergate complex, which routinely charges as much as $1 a gallon more than other stations less than a mile away — including a Sunoco across the street. So that makes it a magnet for news organizations or other groups shopping for a shocking price, especially one within walking distance of the White House.
The full article is available here
