Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbor cited 2008 comments from Steven Chu, now President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, that a gradual increase in gasoline taxes could coax consumers into dumping their gas-guzzlers and finding homes closer to where they work. Chu, then a Nobel Prize-winning professor, argued that higher gas costs could force investments in alternative fuels and spur cleaner energy sources.“This administration’s policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive,” Barbor said during a breakfast.In 2008, while the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Chu told The Wall Street Journal that energy prices were the lynchpin to an energy overhaul.“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Chu said in September 2008. Gas prices in Europe are double or more than those in the US Obama has distanced himself from those comments but his critics seize on them as yet another example of Obama trying to impose a European approach on the United States.Barbor said higher energy costs already hurt workers in his state and any increase would cripple Mississippi’s economy.“In 2008, $4 (a gallon) gasoline brought my state to its knees before Wall Street melted down,” Barbor said.“We’ve blown through $3 gasoline all the way to 4.” Barbor said Obama’s energy team would not be happy until gas prices reached $9 a gallon. (3.8 liters) Barbor is still weighing a presidential campaign and plans to visit Iowa, an early indicator state, twice this month. Barbor’s advisers say he will not make a decision before the Mississippi legislature ends its session in early April and it could be May before he announces a decision.He is a former Republican National Committee chairman who helped the Republican Governors Association make major gains in November’s elections as the group’s chairman.
