Because everything is terrible, it was assured from the beginning that one of the major responses to the question "Should the United States and Europe oppose a Russian autocrat's attempt to conquer a neighboring democracy?" was "But what about gas prices?" A large chunk of the country still believes that covering your nose to help keep people from dying during a pandemic is an assault on their freedoms. While a great many people say they are firm believers in worldwide democracy, that resolve weakens with every new dime temporarily added to gas prices.
So fine, let's talk about gas prices. It turns out that so far, international efforts to cut off Russia's ability to sell oil on the international markets have not resulted in significantly higher crude oil prices, even though market speculation about what might happen as a result of those cutoffs briefly sent crude prices spiking at the beginning of the month.
Some of those speculators may have lost a good chunk of change in the process because as of today, oil prices are already back down to roughly pre-invasion levels. Retail gasoline prices, however, always rise quickly but fall extremely slowly, with every link in the chain trying to maximize profit-taking before begrudgingly knocking prices back down. We've been here countless times, and here we are again:
This is causing Democrats to mutter again about investigating oil company price fixing while Republican elected officials have been unable to contain their glee. But before we get to that: Why the heck are oil prices falling again? Didn't Russia have us all over a, er, barrel?
Ah-ha! As it turns out, the rest of the world has continued to exist even as Putin belligerently proves that the Russian army has at this point been so hollowed by corruption that it can barely function as an actual fighting force. And the rest of the world is still in a pandemic. China especially is in the middle of a new round of pandemic lockdowns that's causing industrial demand for oil to temporarily plummet. So now crude oil markets have turned from bull to bear. Russia may be somewhat more limited in how much oil it can sell to who, but lockdowns at major Chinese manufacturing hubs are, for the moment, an even bigger concern.
The pandemic isn't over, and there's no assurance that new lockdowns won't further mess with supply chains and close down factories elsewhere. But we might also be able to blame a bit of the price drop on the dawning realization that Russia may be incapable of dragging out their war much longer. Oil prices soared on the fear that Russian oil markets were going to be blocked off for the foreseeable future. Now speculators are hearing the same military analysis as the rest of us, and they’re wondering if Putin might be forced to invent reasons for a glorified retreat.
If so, sanctions may not be the permanent fixture that speculators previously assumed, and pandemic softness of oil markets may yet be the bigger driver.
Now for the next part of the equation. Can we drill-baby-drill our way out of this crisis that, um, turns out to not yet be happening, as is the demand of approximately Every Single Republican who has opened their mouths recently? Or less recently? Or ever?
It's not a matter of can or can't. The producers themselves don't want to, because the producers, like the buyers, aren't interested in spending massive amounts of money to boost supplies for a market that may or may not look completely different when those new wells are completed. That's right: The oil companies currently bleeding everyone else dry appear more certain than anyone else that the current high gas prices are only a temporary blip. If Republicans want to give angry speeches about how we need more oil production right-the-heck now, they should be calling up the oil tycoons who bankroll their elections and start yelling at them.
It'll have about as much effect as shouting into a snowstorm, but whatever makes ya feel better, weirdos.
That brings us to the politics of the current gas price spike, which as usual has little to nothing to do with the actual realities of the situation because—say it with me now—everything is terrible and at least half the political leaders in the country aspire to be right-wing radio hosts and look to right-wing radio hosts as the only true source of American political knowledge. You can hear about the "politics" of gas prices from literally every single media outlet in the country right now. At least two-thirds of the remaining national media in this country consist of reporters who ask politicians about politics, then repeat what the politicians said about the politics. Then five pundits who commute daily to a well-lit set sit around arguing not about whether anything anyone has said is true, but over which politician shouted their thing most persuasively and what hypothetical people in hypothetical small-town diners might think about that.
We can dispense with the politics part pretty quickly, then. No, Republican claims of "energy independence" do not have any relation to the real world and nobody involved knows what the hell they’re talking about. More bluntly, pretty much any Republican statement that involves the words "energy independence" and "Trump" is flat-out lies, propaganda peddled from the same voices who brought us theories about Italian satellites and Hunter Biden and whatever that one constantly drunk host on Fox keeps going on about.
No, nothing Joe Biden has done has had much effect on oil markets at all, because that is not how these things work. Even if a certain crooked West Virginia coal guy was not personally devoting himself to cooking your grandchildren alive, it still wouldn't have.
And yes, a lot of the Republican discourse is—go figure!—weirdly focused on blaming Biden personally for gas price speculation while immunizing Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin from the same charges. An example would be the ever-ridiculous House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who sniffed directly that "These aren’t Putin prices. They’re President Biden’s prices."
This is a step beyond what is now rote for House Republicans, in which they declare that all the world's woes stem from ultra-liberal-communist Joe Freaking Biden. Republicans don't have to expand those statements to declare that Putin—the autocrat who personally ordered the invasion and is currently shelling civilian cities in an attempt to show the patients of Ukrainian maternity wards who's boss—isn't to blame for the effects of his own war.
But here we are, time and time again. From Tucker Carlson to Kevin here, Republicanism just can't find the vigor to hate the murderous Putin as much as they hate whatever Democrat is currently in charge of something. The movement has so defined itself as anti-Democratic (and anti-democratic) that it ditched policy concerns entirely in the Trump years. The party can muster no particular interest in matters of war or pandemics, and doesn't want to have an opinion on those things. It is enough to appear on Fox News and declare that a Democrat, somewhere, is conspiring against them.
Oh, and oil company lobbyists are again barking that the real answer is to strip all these burdensome environmental regulations so that companies can pump oil even more cheaply than they already do. So you're going to be hearing that bullshit repeated credulously in the media with little note that the people saying it are literally paid by the oil companies to go find reporters and tell them these things.
What will things look like next week? We don't know. It depends on Russian failures, on new pandemic outbreaks, and on supply chains that remain truly gawdawful because modern management theory demands they look gawdawful and executives who don't make them sufficiently gawdawful get fired and replaced with executives who will. Gas prices will probably still remain quite high because there's no real impetus for refineries and stations to lower prices so long as consumers are, for the moment, willing to pay them.
And maybe Putin finds out he's just as replaceable as all the other crooked kleptocrats he surrounded himself with and is now purging. That's something market speculators have to keep in the back of their minds as well. It's not likely, but who knows where things will stand a week or two from now.
