INDIANAPOLIS—Let’s talk about gasoline.

Gas prices now are in the news.

Those prices had climbed quite a bit in recent months. As the world started to come out of the pandemic, demand increased.
That tends to drive up prices all by itself, but there were other factors involved. The days of securing cheap fossil fuels have been over for quite some time. Oil fields everywhere now require more complicated and more expensive drilling.

The harder it is to find petroleum, the more we all will pay at the pump.

That’s just a reality, one that isn’t affected by which political party is in power. It also isn’t likely to change—at least not in any way that will not result in an increase in costs and, therefore, gas prices.

President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was going to ban imports of oil and natural gas from Russia likely will drive those prices up even higher.

He imposed the ban to hit Vladimir Putin and Russia where it hurts. His intention is to deprive the autocrat and his nation of the economic resources necessary to fund Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

I support Biden’s action, but I also understand why it was a closer judgment call than his critics on either the left or the right seems able to grasp. I also understand why he and others in positions of responsibility aren’t leaping to open all of America’s reserves and flood the market to drive down prices.

It wouldn’t be wise to do so.

One hopes that the United States will not end up in an actual shooting war with Russia. Putin would be foolish to start such a fight, but that such a course would be unwise is not necessarily a guarantee that the Russian leader won’t pursue it.

After all, it has become abundantly clear that he made the decision to invade Ukraine without realizing what a difficult undertaking such a war would be and without having an exit strategy or an endgame in mind. He seems inclined to act first and consider consequences later.

If we were to end up in a war with Russia, our oil reserves would be an essential part of the war effort. As the stalled Russian convoy in Ukraine has demonstrated, tanks, trucks and other combat vehicles aren’t worth much if they can’t be moved.

In fact, if they can’t move, they just make fat targets.

As the world’s oil supply has decreased, prudent nations have been hoarding their reserves for just that reason. If everything goes wrong—if World War III indeed does break out—countries with leaders who are thinking ahead want to make sure that they have held onto the means to keep traffic moving.

Their rhetoric may lean on environmental arguments—in part because such reasoning is more palatable to younger voters and in part because they don’t want to stoke fears of a possible apocalypse—but their motivation is more varied than that.

They’re also thinking of national security.

Nations with smart leadership are investing heavily in alternative energy sources. As it has become more and more clear that oil is a finite commodity, the pressure to find other ways to fuel our lifestyles has become more and more intense.

Those who are skeptical about climate change tend to dismiss initiatives to find alternative and renewable energy sources as little more than tree-hugging.

Such a dismissal overlooks the fact that the world is running out of petroleum and our national defense structure and armed forces are almost entirely dependent on gas-driven vehicles.

If the worst does happen and war does come, we want to make sure that we have the fuel necessary to defend this nation and its citizens.

For that reason, it always has made sense to encourage other nations to deplete their fossil-fuel reserves first.

But Putin’s actions have made the moral costs of saving our petroleum too high. To buy oil and natural gas from Russia now is to fund war crimes.

The realities, though, of humanity’s continued reliance on a diminishing resource made this a tougher call than it otherwise would have been.

All the decisions involving gasoline now are tough ones.

And they’re only going to get tougher.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.