Does Obama Cheer For Higher Gas Prices?

AP – In this photo provided by NBC on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour talks on NBC's …

Haley Barbour, the Mississippi Gov, is making this claim.

Barbour 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 costs per gallon 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," Barbour said during a U.S. Chamber of Commerce breakfast across the street from the White House.

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