BREAKING NEWS: White House Makes Up Mind about Whether Falling Gas Prices Are Good or Bad

In a December 11^th blog, I noted how confused was the Obama administration regarding whether low oil prices benefited Americans. On the one hand, Secretary of State John Kerry intimated to a Peruvian audience that oil “[is] not cheaper,” despite its low price, due to the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels; on the other, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew that same day told a New York audience that low oil prices are “like a tax cut to the economy” and that increased U.S. oil and gas production is a “great success story.”

Today, I’m thrilled to report that the Obama administration has definitively determined that low oil prices are indeed a benefit to the average American. Here’s the breaking news, according to Brian Hughes at the Washington Examiner:

The White House on Monday said that plummeting oil prices are “good for the U.S. economy”… “As a general matter, the impact of falling energy prices has been good for the U.S. economy,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest, as the price of U.S. oil Monday dropped below $50 a barrel for the first time since April 2009.

Incredibly, the  impetus for the White House’s extraordinary concession was a fall in stock prices, which experts have attributed to the fall in oil prices, rather that the dire planetary threat posed by apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming. Thus it would seem that Secretary Kerry’s viewpoint was far from the decision-making calculus. (Not for the first time).