<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-96201116/stock-photo-refuel-the-car-on-a-gas-station-man-holding-the-tap.html?src=3SM2LTf13MKawpUWudszqQ-1-86">Kzenon</a>/Shutterstock
In his final State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama promised to “change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.” A few days later, he followed through on the coal aspect of that pledge, with a plan to overhaul how coal mining leases are awarded on federal land. Now, he seems ready to roll out his plan for oil.
The president’s budget proposal for his last year in office, set to be released next week, will contain a provision to place a new tax on oil, White House aides told reporters. According to Politico:
The president will propose more than $300 billion worth of investments over the next decade in mass transit, high-speed rail, self-driving cars, and other transportation approaches designed to reduce carbon emissions and congestion. To pay for it all, Obama will call for a $10 “fee” on every barrel of oil, a surcharge that would be paid by oil companies but would presumably be passed along to consumers…The fee could add as much as 25 cents a gallon to the cost of gasoline.
The proposal stands virtually no chance of being adopted by Congress. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the renowned climate change denier who also chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, “I’m unsure why the president bothers to continue to send a budget to Congress. His proposals are not serious, and this is another one which is dead on arrival.”
Still, the idea may be helped a little by the sustained drop in oil prices, driven by a glut of supply from the Middle East and record production in the United States. Gas is already selling for less than $2 per gallon in all but 11 states, the lowest price point since 2009. Raising that cost would also be a boon for electric vehicle sales, which have stagnated because of low gas prices as sales of gas guzzlers have climbed.
Obama’s prospective Democratic successors, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, haven’t weighed in on this proposal yet, although they have both been broadly supportive of his climate change agenda. But the proposal could prove to be awkward for Clinton, who has promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year.
