Are gas prices at a record high? Yes, but in a more important sense, no.
Gas prices are at a “record high,” according to The News. The average price-per-gallon at the pump today is $4.173, which is a number that is bigger than all the numbers that came before it, which is Important, according to the serious TV men with furrowed brows.
On the one hand this is technically true. Official federal data on gas prices goes back to 1993 and that sticker price has never been higher than it is today. Just look at this chart!
But comparing sticker prices over long time periods like this isn’t exactly useful because of a little thing, that most of you are probably aware of, called inflation. A dollar in 2022 doesn’t buy as much as it did five or ten or twenty years ago. And when you adjust for inflation, you get a price chart that actually looks like this:
The prices we’re paying at the pump today are still, in real-dollar terms, lower than what we paid the aftermath of and run-up to the great recession a decade ago. Does it still suck? Yes, nobody likes paying more money for things. Will it go higher still? Probably yeah, given that the Biden administration recently announced a ban on oil imports from Russia. Will it go high enough to even break the inflation-adjusted record? At this point I’d be surprised if it didn’t.
What we’re being reminded of today is that you can have relatively cheap gas OR you can shut off the flow of cash to corrupt authoritarian petro-states, but in this global economy you can’t really do both. As if to emphasize this point, the Biden administration has in recent days been making googly-eyes at other corrupt authoritarian petro-states like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, presumably in the hopes of making sweetheart deals to ease the pain of the Russian oil boycott.
One way to break this cycle is to wean ourselves off fossil fuels entirely, which has the bonus effect of ensuring the earth remains habitable for humans in the coming centuries. But this would take a really long time even if we were serious about it, which, as a country, we’re not.
The best-case scenario at this point depends on your outlook. If you’re looking to ensure the long-term survival of the human race, you might hope that gas prices spiral upward, creating the economic incentive to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. If you just want to tamp down on inflation, damn the long-term consequences, you might hope that the crisis in Russia and Ukraine makes policymakers more open to domestic oil production, no matter how dirty that production gets in the short-term. If you’re a cockroach, you’re probably just rooting for global thermonuclear war.
At any rate, it doesn’t look like the pain at the pump is going away any time soon.