"Evil oil companies"? Inflation-adjusted price of gas is the lowest it's been in 40 years

There's an inexorable pattern in this country:  Liberals and Democrat politicians warn you that DOOM awaits if you continue to do X (or fail to do Y--a distinction without a difference).  They DEMAND that the government spend literally billions of tax dollars to do as they want, or to stop you from doing what you want.

Meanwhile people in the so-called "private sector" come up with better, cheaper ways to solve whatever the Dems were screaming about--without using tax dollars.

This "free market" solves the problem.  But 20 years later--always--almost everyone has forgotten about the screechy demands by libs, and the billions of dollars they made the government waste.  So voters never learn the obvious lesson.

Example: There's an organization called OPEC.  If you're under 30 you've never heard of it, yet 40 years ago it was the most powerful organization in the world.  It could--and did--make the U.S. government jump thru hoops.  Anyone remember what OPEC stands for?

It's the "Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries," whose first members were Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.  In 1973 and 1979 this group declared an "oil embargo" on the U.S., cutting oil sales to the U.S, because of our support of Israel.

Not surprisingly, this caused a huge jump in gas prices, but that was just the beginning:  It also triggered lots of government action:  In some states you could only buy gas on odd or even dates, depending on the last digit of your license plate.  The federal government spent tens of billions on money-losing rail-based city transit systems (which Dems said would cover their cost from fares but which have always lost money and now lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year)..

President Jimmy Carter--a Democrat--signed a nationwide speed limit of 55 mph into law.

Now, if you're from the northeast a 55mph limit wasn't much of a burden, because cities are close together and traffic is often so bad that the average speed is less than 55, but for people in the western U.S. it was a different story.  No one wanted to drive 55 on a thousand-mile trip.  But hey, that was now the law.

Of course one way to counter an oil embargo is to increase supply.  But when industry experts suggested that we increase oil exploration in the U.S. and offshore, leftists and their media allies swore that this wouldn't help; was stupid; that it was totally impossible to change our nation's dependence on imported oil no matter how much exploration we did. 

The stock saying by Democrat pols--as recently as ten years ago--was "We can't just drill our way out of this problem."

Ah.

So..."We can't drill our way out of this," eh?  Then tell us, wonderfully smaht elites and Dem pols: why is the inflation-adjusted price of gas today lower than at any time in the past 40 years?

Wait, I hear Democrat "strategists" sneering that the above chart stops LAST YEAR!  "AHA!  The price of gas this year has to be higher, or you would have included it!"

Oooh, ya got me on that!  So let's see what the price of gas is, by state, today:

Wait, did you say you read that the AAA reported the average price of gas as $2.34 (still 5% less than 2017's average)?  Yes, because that includes California's insane state-tax-driven price of $3.36.  And when you look at that state's population of over 39 million--12% of the whole nation--that pulls the nationwide average up a LOT.

So why is the inflation-adjusted price of gas lower than at any time in the last 40 years?

Could it be because the Middle East is so peaceful now?  Certainly sounds plausible, right?

No?

Okay, try this:  It's cuz the world is awash in all that oil the U.S. stole from Iraq, right?  I mean, the Left absolutely assured us that's the real reason we invaded Iraq, right?  (Readers over 30 may recall nightly news footage of leftist demonstrators chanting "No blood for oil!")

Not due to stolen oil?  Hmmm....

Okay, try this:  The price of gas is low because the OTHER advanced nations of the world--all the leaders of which agree that humans need to stop using oil and other fossil fuels in order to stop global warming --pardon, "climate change"-- have drasticallly cut their use of gasoline, and switched to zero-energy electric cars!  Yeah, dat's it!

Wait...you don't suppose...yes, THAT'S IT!  It's part of Vlad Putin's diabolical plan:  Keep oil production high, to keep the price low, to make Americans resist changing to electric cars!  Yeah, dat's it!!!

No, it's not.

The reason is that because of efforts totally funded by the private sector, new technology has been developed that has doubled U.S. oil production in a decade.  At no increase in market price.

Doubled it.

Think about that for a second:  This is nothing short of a miracle.  And because the whole world's daily demand for oil was perfectly matched to daily production a decade ago, what do you think happened when the U.S. brought another 5 million barrels PER DAY on-line?

Yep: the price dropped--just like Econ-101 said it would.

And of course you've never heard a single word about any of this til now.  Which isn't your fault, of course.  You would only have known about this if your Lying Mainstream Media decided to cover the story.  But they didn't, because they didn't want you to know.  "Not of national interest, citizen."  They'd rather cover Hollywood.

Ah.

Of course oil-industry journals have extensively covered this amazing miracle, and the gruberment's "Department of Energy" keeps publishing the weekly and monthly stats.  So this isn't some right-wing fantasy.  All the information's out there, in the public domain, available to anyone who knows where to look.  But you don't know where to look, any more than I could tell one strain of wheat from another.

So the next time some leftist moonbat wails that oil is bad, and cars are awful, and gas prices are way too high, ask them if they know any time in the last 40 f'n YEARS when the inflation-adjusted price of gas has been lower than it is today.  Be prepared for a lot of deflection and attempts to change the subject.

Then ask 'em if they have the vaguest idea WHY the price of gasoline is so low.