The Beacon: Dustin Cranor's blog Editor's Note: This article
originally appeared in the Huffington Post. Are gas prices
impacted by the source of countries' oil? The graphic below,
from Oceana, suggests that how much oil a country imports does
not affect gas prices. Rather, the group "found that while
gasoline prices vary greatly among these five nations, the
variation is almost entirely attributable to variation in
gasoline taxes," according to an Oceana email sent to HuffPost.
"Once these taxes are factored out, gasoline prices are largely
the same across the five nations, despite marked differences in
how much oil is sourced domestically versus via imports. This
shows that gasoline prices are largely independent of how much
oil a country imports or produces domestically, or, in simpler
terms, we cannot drill our way to lower gasoline prices.” A 2012
study, of "36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline
prices and U.S. domestic oil production," by the Associated
Press found that there is "no statistic