Jeff Alson is a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network and a former Senior Engineer and Policy Advisor in EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, where he spent 40 years working on car pollution.
President Trump has shown remarkably little concern about making Americans pay higher gasoline prices. His choices to start and continue the Iran War have raised U.S. gasoline prices to near all-time highs, devastating family budgets, and his shortsighted decision to weaken clean-vehicle policies will continue to raise gasoline costs for decades to come.
The ongoing war has had a massive and foreseeable impact. It was totally predictable that, in retaliation to U.S. and Israeli attacks, Iran would restrict oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and counterattack oil production and refining facilities throughout the Mideast. As expected, reduced global oil supply sparked a major energy price shock.
As of July 23, the war has raised world oil prices from $60 per barrel to about $100 per barrel. Nationally, the average regular gasoline price has risen from about $3 per gallon to $4.10 per gallon. The Brown University Iran War Energy Cost Tracker projects that higher gasoline and diesel prices due to the war have already cost US consumers $73 billion, or more than $500 for every U.S. household. These higher costs contribute to the ongoing inflation that is eating away at family budgets.
The price increases could have been even worse, but markets have so far been tempered by the belief that the fighting would soon end and Mideast oil production would quickly recover. After five months of chaos alternating between hopeful promises of peace and desperate escalations of war, that confidence may be wearing thin. If markets shift from “expecting the best” to “fearing the worst,” an added risk premium could push prices at the pump even higher.
One of the best protections that American consumers could have to $4 gasoline would be to transition to more fuel efficient gasoline vehicles and, over time, to greater adoption of electric vehicles that use no gasoline. But, making matters even worse for consumers in the future, the Trump administration has completely dismantled U.S. fuel economy standards and tailpipe carbon pollution limits so automakers will not have to build cleaner, more efficient cars and trucks. This will increase U.S. gasoline consumption over time and limit the choices people have to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. It’s Economics 101: greater gasoline demand plus lower supply means higher prices. Even the U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that increased gasoline consumption associated with less-fuel efficient vehicles on the road could contribute to gasoline prices up to 76 cents per gallon higher by 2050.
Predictable and moderate gasoline prices are considered a key indicator of a healthy and stable economy. Why is President Trump choosing to raise gasoline prices for American families?
The president appears to believe that higher gasoline prices do not matter to Americans. He has called the issue of affordability “a hoax” and the U.S. economy “the greatest in the history of the world.” On March 5, in an interview with Reuters, he dismissed the risks of higher gasoline prices with “if they rise, they rise.” President Trump can afford to shrug off higher gasoline prices. A small-business owner deciding between filling the company truck and making payroll cannot.
President Trump often points to stock-market returns as proof of economic success. But families and small businesses judge the economy by their kitchen-table budgets, and higher gasoline prices leave them with less. The oil industry spent heavily to support Trump and other Republicans in 2024, and its leading trade groups explicitly urged the administration to roll back clean-vehicle standards. Those rollbacks will keep Americans buying more gasoline for longer, increasing oil-company sales while leaving families and small businesses more exposed to high and volatile prices at the pump.
For the first time in history, we have a president simultaneously pursuing multiple policies that significantly increase gasoline prices. While families, businesses, and the media understandably focus on the immediate financial pain of $4 gasoline over the five months of the Iran War, we must not lose sight of the fact that the president’s short-sighted climate policies could lock us into decades of dependence on inefficient gasoline cars and higher, more volatile gasoline prices.
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