What can Biden do to bring down oil prices?

Oil prices have recently flirted with the highs reached shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, starting the week at around $120 per barrel, before falling back slightly. Still, the price of a barrel has risen about 8 percent over the past month, and more than 50 percent since the start of the year.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.92 on Tuesday, setting another record, according to AAA. That’s about 30 cents higher than a week earlier and $1.87 above a year ago.

In hopes of reducing gas prices and securing oil supplies, President Biden is set to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, The New York Times’s Clifford Krauss writes. When Mr. Biden does, he will be following in the footsteps of presidents like Jimmy Carter, who flew to Tehran in 1977 to exchange toasts with the shah of Iran on New Year’s Eve. Like the prince, the shah was an unelected monarch with a tarnished human rights record.

As Mr. Carter and other presidents learned, Mr. Biden has precious few tools to bring down costs at the pump. But “a president has to try,” said Bill Richardson, an energy secretary in the Clinton administration. “Unfortunately, there are only bad options. And any alternative options are probably worse than asking the Saudis to increase production.”

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