It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes. In that context, the recent rise in oil prices seems to have turned the Obama administration into true believers (at least rhetorically) when it comes to the best method to keep gas prices down and the American economy growing.

With oil at more than $100 a barrel, the White House announced last week that it was going to increase oil supply by withdrawing 30 million barrels a month from our strategic oil reserves and put that oil into the world market.

As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner usefully explained last week, according to Reuters, "costlier energy and less vigorous worldwide growth would keep U.S. economic growth to around a 2 percent annual rate in the first half this year." Geithner said, "Reserves exist to help mitigate those kinds of disruptions," and Reuters paraphrased him as saying that "putting additional oil supplies on market was 'sensible policy' that should give a lift to a slowly expanding economy."

This has not been the analysis the Obama administration, until now, has brought to the issue. Over the past few years, the administration has argued that gas is too cheap. The president's secretary of energy has said that "somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." When gas went up to $4 a gallon, the president was asked on CNBC whether $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy. The president replied, "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment." In other words, he wants the price of gasoline in America to go higher but he would prefer that it go up gradually (presumably so that the new grim reality could sneak up on the public slowly and with little attention paid to the steady increase). One has to commend the president for that remarkably frank statement.

Certainly, the administration's ban and delays on offshore and new Alaska drilling, the opposition to letting American oil companies develop and rapidly bring on line the vast supply of newly found shale oil and shale natural gas, the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to force many of America's coal-firing utilities out of business and the proposed special tax increases on American oil companies are consistent with the administration's aforequoted policy of restricting energy production in order to raise the cost of energy to Americans. (Full disclosure: As I have stated in previous columns, believing as I do in free markets and high levels of energy production for America, I give professional, compensated advice to American energy-producing corporations.)