If you’re a primary voter, you’ve got your pick of candidates who’ll promise to bring down the price of gasoline. Unfortunately, whoever wins is going to run up against the limits of presidential power pretty quickly.

The fact is that presidents don’t have that much authority over the price of oil, for a number of virtually inescapable reasons.

With time frames like that, what the next president should do, and has to do, is get us to an energy policy that deals with our long term issues: the soaring worldwide demand for energy, and how we meet it without ending up with ruinous global climate change. That means going back to fundamental questions about the kinds