What can a president do about gas prices?

With the price of a gallon of gasoline doubling over the course of Barack Obama's time in office, many voters will head to the polls this fall to hold the president accountable.  Meanwhile, many Obama supporters argue that the president has no control over gas prices and it would be silly to vote for a candidate who promises to lower them.

So how much control does a president really have over gasoline prices?

Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu was convinced that artificially raising the price of gasoline would force more Americans to adopt more environmentally friendly alternatives.  "[W]e have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Chu told the Wall Street Journal in 2008.  Four years later, Chu and the Obama administration are now about halfway toward accomplishing their goal.

(Photo: AP)

The Washington Examiner has an editorial out today which explains how:

In five of the last six years, the price of a gallon of gas decreased between July and October as Americans cut back on their vacation driving and winter gasoline blends were phased in at the pump. Gas prices dropped by an average of 27 cents over these months. But not this year. This year, the average price of a gallon of gas rose 46 cents between July and October. Why?

Part of the reason is that oil production on government lands has plummeted under Obama, falling by 14 percent in 2011 alone, according to Interior Department numbers. Obama never tires of pointing out that total domestic oil production is at an all-time high, but all the new production is taking place on private lands that are not subject to Obama's stringent permitting process or tortuous environmental regulation.

That may not seem significant, except that most of this new production is in areas that lack the needed refinery and transportation infrastructure that is currently located near our traditional public land sources. Without new pipelines and refineries better positioned to transport oil from private land to market, there will continue to be an oil bottleneck that drives up the price of gas at the pump, even as the price of oil falls.

So besides placing government restrictions on the production and exploration of oil in America, what else can a president do to affect gas prices?

The solution to this problem is to build new refineries and new pipelines, like the planned Keystone pipeline that would connect Canada's oil sand with existing oil refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. But of course, Obama and his environmental allies have blocked this and many other oil infrastructure projects.

In other words, Californians are now suffering at the pump because they have let their energy infrastructure become too fragile. Instead of developing the resources closest to them (including the more than 300 million barrels of oil sitting off of California's coast in the Pacific Ocean), California has chosen to become dependent on other states for its oil supply. And instead of building a diverse group of smaller refineries and shorter pipelines, California relies on a big dog that can suddenly take ill.

Americans will face a choice this November. They can go down the path California has chosen, a path of less oil development, fewer refineries and higher gas prices. Or they can let the market build a robust energy infrastructure that will create thousands of construction jobs now and keep energy prices low for decades. Depending on the choice they make, $7 gas could really be just four more years away.