Anyone who has filled up at their local gas station has seen that the average price of gas is $3.84 per gallon according to AAA. In many parts of the country the price of gas is well over $4 per gallon. This increase is a painful cost for many Americans, especially in a fragile American economy. Something needs to be done to bring down the price of gas and our dependence on imported oil.

High gas prices have a negative encompassing effect on the entire economy by making everything from driving to production more expensive. Something needs to be done about the rise in prices to protect the economy’s slow and fragile recovery. What we need to do is to access the oil resources that we already have in the United States to bring down the price of gas and help our financial recovery.

Unfortunately, the administration is not as concerned about spiking gas prices as many of Americans are. It appears that President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was quoted in 2008 as saying, “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Recently, his comments in front of the Senate Energy Natural Resources Committee suggest that the administration plan for high gas prices is not to lower them. They believe that the high gas prices will encourage the average Americans to use different forms of energy and to use more fuel efficient vehicles like the Toyota Hybrid and the new Chevy Volt.

The problem with this logic is that many Americans cannot not afford new technology like the Chevy Volt. In fact, Chevrolet has halted production of the new cars because they are being sold at a much slower rate then anticipated.

It will still be some time before a suitable replacement for gas and oil is developed and produced at a cheaper price than gasoline. There is no reason why the average American has to suffer at the pump when we can access our own oil here in the United States like the oil fields in North Dakota, where billions of barrels of oil are estimated to be. That is not even considering how many jobs would be created by harvesting those resources. Of course it is inevitable that oil and natural gas will be replaced by alternative forms of energy but that is the energy of the future, not of the present. The present, right now, is very important and we need to utilize all the resources we have to keep our economy afloat.