Peter Hamby
CNN
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Washington (CNN) – With price of gasoline rising for the eighth consecutive day, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour accused the Obama administration of hiking energy costs in an effort to promote alternative fuels.
“In 2008, four dollar gasoline brought my state to its knees, before Wall Street melted down, and we have blown through three dollars a gallon on our way to four,” Barbour, a Republican who is seriously considering a White House bid, said Wednesday in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “We don’t need that where I am.”
“But this administration’s policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive,” he said.
As evidence, Barbour referenced a 2008 comment by Obama’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu. At the time, Chu was still director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He told the Wall Street Journal that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” in order to force consumers to be more fuel-efficient.
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