Remember John Hofmeister?
He's the former Shell Oil president who spent the BP oil disaster claiming that the leak could be cleaned up by attaching a big vacuum cleaner to a supertanker. When they finally tried Hofmeister's plan, it was a miserable failure, but he still got a ton of uncritical coverage from the media for his idea -- including his totally false conspiracy theory that the Obama Administration was blocking his plan at the behest of unions because they were refusing to waive the Jones Act.
Well, Hofmeister is now making a new claim: he's saying that by the time the presidential election rolls around, gas will be at $5 per gallon.
The former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, says Americans could be paying $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012.
In an interview with Platt's Energy Week television, Hofmeister predicted gasoline prices will spike as the global demand for oil increases.
"I'm predicting actually the worst outcome over the next two years which takes us to 2012 with higher gasoline prices," he said.
...
Gasoline prices have been steadily rising. Last week, gas prices crossed the $3 mark for the first time since October 2008. According to AAA figures, prices are up 4% from a month ago and 16% from the $2.585 average a year ago.
A study from the Oil Price Information Service estimates drivers will spend $305 on gasoline in December. According to the study, fuel prices are up 13.6% from last December and 76% higher from December 2008.
And who does Hofmeister say is to blame for these increasing prices? Well, naturally, President Obama:
Hofmeister, who earlier aired his concerns in an interview with Platts Energy Week, criticized the administration for cracking down on domestic oil drilling in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"It is pure politics that keeps us from drilling more of our own resources," he said.
Sure. It's Obama's fault that oil is a finite resource. If he would just wave his magic wand and release the ingenuity of the oil industry, we'd have an unlimited, cheap, and risk-free source of energy right at our fingertips. I mean, if we just did more drilling like Deepwater Horizon, we'd have everything we could ever want in the world, and it would all be here within two or three months, because the people who say oil is a limited natural resource are crazy. Right?
