Isn’t it amazing what a couple of bad polls can produce? In 2008, then-incoming-Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal that American energy policy should be calibrated to drive the cost of gasoline to the same level as Europe in order to produce more demand for alternative energy production.
Almost four years later, with Barack Obama beginning to see his polling slip on rapidly-rising gas prices and the compounded pain it causes working- and middle-class families, Chu finally walked back that statement in testimony to Congress today.