Gas prices leveled off this month after weeks of increasing, but the national average for unleaded is still $1.20 higher than a year ago, data from the fuel price aggregator GasBuddy shows.
As USA TODAY has reported, this spike is due in large part to production cuts that followed a drop in demand during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Production has been slow to ramp back up to meet the post-lockdown demand.
One social media post shared more than 40,000 times in two weeks claims that U.S. prices have soared past those in some other nations, which it blames on President Joe Biden's policies.
“Gasoline in Russia $2.10, Kuwait 78 cents, Saudia Arabia 98 cents,” reads the Nov. 17 Facebook post. “Nobody shutting pipelines down there.”
The post ends with the acronym directing an expletive at Biden
But this post is misleading. The gas prices it lists are from more than a decade ago.
While U.S. gas prices are still higher than those of Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that has far more to do with different government subsidies and taxes among the three nations than with pipeline infrastructure, experts say.
Pipelines have little do with the pricing variance, said Greg Upton, associate research professor at the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies. President Joe Biden rejected a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in June that ultimately shut down the project, but Upton said...
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