I remember all too well the last time fuel prices exceeded four dollars per gallon.

It was in the summer of 2008, right before the Great Recession. My youngest son was just born. At the time, I was driving a 15-year-old midsize pickup truck. It had a 25 gallon tank, got 16 miles per gallon on the highway, and, due to some unidentified ignition issue I never spent the time to figure out, would ping while going uphill unless I fed it premium. Around the same time, I got a new job in Minden, which was nearly 60 miles from my home in Stead — for those of you reading from down south, this would be similar to commuting from Pahrump to Las Vegas.

Nationally, average gas prices that summer reached a bit over $4.11 per gallon in 2008 dollars — adjusting for inflation, that works out to $5.36 per gallon today. Prices in Reno, however, have always been a bit higher than the national average. According to GasBuddy, regular unleaded currently costs around $5 per gallon right now, well above the current national average of $4.33 per gallon and substantially more than the $4.60 per gallon people in Clark County are currently paying. 

Summer 2008 was no exception. It certainly didn’t help that I had to pick the most expensive pump at the gas station to keep my truck’s engine from knocking. Adjusting for inflation, I was probably paying the modern-day equivalent of about $6 per gallon — and burning four of those gallons in each direction during my work commute.

Thankfully, at least for me in particular, neither my truck nor the record-high fuel prices lasted for long. 

By the end of 2008, average fuel prices dropped to $1.75 per gallon, or $2.35 per gallon in today’s dollars — but it took the biggest economic contraction since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still ambulatory to get them there. Prices weren’t that low again until the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the price of American crude oil briefly dropped below zero dollars per barrel (in other words, if you had a place to park a barrel of crude, suppliers would literally pay you to take their product off their hands) because the entire world, Donald Trump’s America included, stayed home to “flatten the curve” for a few weeks. 

This tells us something about cheap gasoline — it’s not something you find at the pump these days when all else is well and normal.

As for the truck, well, it was a good truck, but it wasn’t built to be a long-term highway commuter. One morning, the transmission died on the way to work and fixing it would have taken at least a couple thousand dollars I didn’t have. I traded it in as a downpayment for a much smaller car with much better gas mileage and a back seat. The money I saved on gas probably covered most of the car payment.

All of this is a roundabout way of explaining that, yes, I sympathize with those who are feeling pinched by higher fuel prices, especially as, if you live in Northern Nevada, you’re either driving to work or you’re walking. Mass transportation in this area, especially since the Regional Transportation Commission faced a series of strikes and continues to face persistent staffing shortages, is a slow, expensive joke. To pick a personal example, I can either drive 40 minutes from my home near Sparks City Hall to where I work in Carson City, burning a gallon of gas in each direction, or I can spend the better part of two hours (and $9) riding three separate buses to work — then I’d have to do it again to get home.

Even my old truck could get me to Carson City and back on less than $18.

To be clear, I don’t expect our regional mass transportation system to optimize its services for those who commute to Carson City and back, but the situation isn’t any better for those who work elsewhere. It takes at least an hour, including a mile walk, to get from my home to the Amazon Fulfillment Center (a 20 minute drive at most) and costs $4 each way for a trip that would otherwise consume less than half a gallon of gas in most cars. As for those who work at the Tesla Gigafactory or anywhere else at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, hopefully Elon Musk or Panasonic are running bus lines for workers, because the Regional Transportation Commission certainly isn’t. 

The situation isn’t any better for students. Getting to the local community college from where I live either takes two nearly mile-long walks (the second, on Dandini Boulevard, would be up a significant incline) and two buses, or you can skip the walk but arrive 10 minutes after the start of the hour. Choosing the latter option means you’re going to be perpetually late for class if it starts at the top of the hour or you’re going to be waiting around the campus for most of an hour for your first class of the day to start. Oh, and each direction costs $4 for a trip which, even at today’s gas prices, would barely cost half of that in a car.

Again, I live near Sparks City Hall. It would be one thing if I lived in one of the newer neighborhoods of endless tract homes towards the edge of town, but I don’t. The neighborhood I live in was originally built up, at least in some part, sometime between the Great Depression and the end of World War 2. There’s a city hall, a post office, two schools, and several homes and apartments nearby. My city councilman lives up the street from me with his mother in his childhood home. The reason we don’t have affordable, efficient alternatives to car travel, with all the expenses it entails, is because, in the more than seven decades of my neighborhood’s existence, there’s apparently never been the political or economic demand for them.

There is one place, at least, where there’s political demand for them in this area — the casinos, or at least the ones in downtown Reno and Sparks, which never fail to demand that every transportation option in town stops by their doors. They even lobby to move bike lanes closer to their doors here, just in case someone feels the urge to play some blackjack while pedaling through downtown. Unless you plan on working or visiting one, however, there frankly aren’t a lot of options in Northern Nevada for getting around if your car stops working or you can no longer afford to fill your tank. 

This is legitimately and justifiably frustrating — and where frustrations exist, it’s only natural that some politician somewhere will try to speak to them.

Which, I suppose, is how we ended up with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), leader of the same caucus who demanded we stop buying Russian gas, claiming that the cause of our higher prices at the pump isn’t Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — no, instead, it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. 

As an exercise in mood affiliation, this line of… let’s be charitable and call it “reasoning” makes sense. According to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, Republicans really aren’t actually fond of Putin, but they are more fond of him than they are Joe Biden. Consequently, pointing at Biden’s rescinding of Trump’s executive order permitting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — an expansion of the long-existing Keystone Pipeline System, which can already deliver up to 700,000 barrels of oil to Texas refineries — makes some political sense, at least as long as you don’t look too deeply into the optics of a Canadian oil company using eminent domain to force American landowners to allow construction of an oil pipeline on their lands.

As an exercise in taking public policy halfway seriously, however, it fails miserably. Even with Trump’s executive order in place, the Keystone XL pipeline project was legally frozen in the U.S. Supreme Court, with permitted construction unlikely to begin before 2021. Even in the alternate universe of continued Republican control over the executive branch, it’s extremely unlikely construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline would have been completed by now, especially given the current tightness of the construction labor market.

The factual problems with this politically driven counter-narrative don’t end there. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, during Republican president George Bush’s administration, the price of oil increased from $16.94 per barrel to nearly $30 per barrel, then finally peaked at $41.07 per barrel that October. The reason why the price of oil more than doubled is obvious — Iraq was (and still is) one of the world’s largest producers of oil and its invasion of Kuwait disrupted sales of both Iraq’s and Kuwait’s oil. Russia, meanwhile, has always produced more oil than Iraq — according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Russia has always produced at least twice as much crude oil as Iraq ever did. Given that, it would be nothing short of miraculous, regardless of what anybody in the White House said or did, if the price of oil didn’t increase due to the sudden loss of 13 percent of the world’s crude oil production.

Adding insult to injury, remember when I said the price for a barrel of oil briefly went negative in 2020? This may come as something of a shock, but, regardless of who’s president of the United States, oil suppliers won’t operate at a loss for very long — and when you’re literally paying people to take your product, it’s mathematically impossible to make a profit. Consequently, oil production was already declining substantially since the start of the pandemic. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, though production totals aren’t available for 2021 yet, oil production decreased from 100,205 million barrels per day in 2019 to 93,826 million barrels per day in 2020 — a six percent decrease in production that year alone. This raises yet another question against the Keystone XL pipeline — even if it existed today, who would be producing the oil to fill it?

The real truth behind high gas prices, especially up here in Northern Nevada, is simple and has nothing to do with who’s presently occupying the White House.

First, Nevada doesn’t refine most of its own petroleum products — according to a petroleum supply chain analysis prepared for the state Department of Transportation in 2019, there were only two operating refineries in the state in 2019 — and so most of our fuel comes from out of state. Since oil is frequently shipped via supertanker, and the nearest place to dock a supertanker is California, most of our gasoline is refined in California. That alone, in conjunction with California’s environmental laws and regulations, keeps Nevada’s fuel prices higher than they are throughout most of the country.

Additionally, thanks to the approval of Washoe County ballot question RTC-5, which proposed an inflation-indexed fuel tax, followed by the passage of SB 201 in 2009 (originally sponsored by none other than current Republican congressman Mark Amodei) which implemented the proposed fuel tax, Washoe County drivers pay more in fuel taxes than any other county in the state. Without it, Washoe County’s fuel prices would look more like the prices drivers in Carson City and Fernley routinely enjoy (for an admittedly loose definition of the word these days).

On top of all of that, the producer of 13 percent of the world’s crude oil started a costly invasion of its neighbor, which produced a raft of sanctions from the rest of the world in response. Those sanctions are doing what sanctions against Venezuela and Iran have been doing for years — driving Russia’s economy into a tailspin and reducing its ability to continue to efficiently produce oil.

It’s possible — probable, perhaps — that partisan hacks truly believe the rest of us regularly consume truly collegiate amounts of our state’s most recently legalized controlled substance, developed severe short-term memory loss as a result, and consequently don’t remember what oil markets looked like last month, much less a decade ago or when Saddam Hussein became a household name three decades back. The sooner we can shrug off those who insist on insulting our memory and intelligence, however, the sooner we can have a serious conversation not only about the price of gasoline, but also about how dependent Nevada’s workers and residents are on a single mode of transportation, one that relies on capriciously priced fuel we can only get from neighboring states.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].