One of the things I genuinely love about this site is that on it I can find people of all ages, locales and political views. I'm not saying anyone's mind is being changed by this thread, or that any of these posts are particularly enlightening, but it's nice that you actually get more than just one of "oil price high, let's go Brandon" and "oil company bad, GOP bad", which is how I read these.
I am, if anything, the most out of touch and enbubbled new-englander and this really is the last thing I check that doesn't feel like an echo chamber.
Anyways, I hardly ever drive anywhere, but I don't feel too smug about that just yet, as the price of oil affects basically everything else in the economy. Food costs more, anything that moves anywhere costs more. Yes, higher oil prices may eventually put us as a nation in a better place, but this is yet again another example where the path between where we are now and where we need to be looks like a disasterous mess, where the current administration has had to quickly shift its rhetoric 180 degrees. Other recent examples of this include our exit from Afghanistan, and the switch from "we need more stimulus" to an all-hands-on-deck fight against inflation.
America is highly dependent on oil, and many millions of people's lives get harder when the cost of it increases quickly. Biden realizes this, and also knows that his party is going to get absolutely hosed in the fall if it stays high. One of the reasons I voted for him was the hope that he understood or had people that understood that all of the rigs that were shuttered during covid (due to crashing demand and price of oil), all of the supply chains that get the specialized hardware, fracking sand, etc. need time and incentives to restart, and that oil companies are not going to stop minting cash (what company would) to help his presidency. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it sucks.