High Gasoline Prices

I have been meaning to write on this topic for a while.

Today, President Bush said "if Congress was worried about the impact that soaring gas prices were having on citizens, it would urge the construction of new domestic refineries and allow for environmentally friendly energy exploration in the United States." The Yahoo article points out that he has long called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil development, and has chastised Congress for repeatedly blocking the proposal, which is strongly opposed by environmentalists, most Democrats and a few moderate Republicans.

IMHO, the blame for our current high gasoline prices lies squarely on the U.S. Congress. Their policies have aggravated the price of gasoline. And they have the authority to take the following actions which would reduce the price of gasoline immediately and in the long term:
1. Permanently remove federal gasoline taxes (18.4 cents)
2. Allow drilling and oil production in ANWR
3. Allow drilling and oil production on the outer continential shelf in California and Florida.
4. Provide incentives for drilling and oil production in North Dakota
5. Remove barriers for building new oil refineries or even provide incentives for building new oil refineries
6. Enforce a uniform blend of gasoline and prevent states from requiring special blends of gasoline (this causes unnecessarily high gasoline prices every time a refinery goes down)
7. Provide incentives for the construction of coal liquefaction plants to produce gasoline from coal (strongly opposed by environmental groups but, hey, we have a lot more coal than oil and the technology has been already demonstrated in the U.S.)
8. Provide incentives for alternative fuel vehicles and the corresponding fueling stations (natural gas and ethanol, but not propane, which comes from oil)
9. Allow coal mining and drilling for oil in federal lands (yes, national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, national forests, and the 100 to 120 million tons of Utah coal fields that Bill Clinton included in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996)