Dem Rep. Pocan: There's Been Price Gouging in Oil 'For Over a Year Now'

On Friday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) said there has been price gouging “by oil companies for over a year now.” And that the significant drop in the price of oil after President Joe Biden announced he’d release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve shows that the price was artificially high.

Pocan said, “I actually think we should be much more aggressive with some of the oil company executives. You have to remember, gas prices started going up about last March when, in Texas, their energy grid wasn’t properly supported for the weather. They had some outages that affect some of the processing, and the next thing you know, gas prices shot up and they never went down. And we now have recordings from oil executives where they’ve said that they didn’t increase production in order to return more for their shareholders. They didn’t give a damn about consumers, what they cared about were their bottom lines. And that’s had prices up, and now, with the war in Ukraine, clearly, that’s having an additional effect. So, the president’s doing the right thing to try to affect prices. But this is one where I’m glad the Energy and Commerce Committee has invited oil company executives to come in for a hearing. Because I think there’s a lot more to this story that involves a lot of price gouging that also has to be looked at.”

He added, “[W]e should be talking about what the reality is, which is, again, price gouging, I think, by oil companies for over a year now. But we should really put some pressure on them. All it took was the president to say he was going to release more oil and the price per barrel went down significantly. That shows you the artificially high price that’s been out there and that’s the right thing the president’s doing by going after those companies and Congress having hearings on that.”

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