India, China boom pushing fuel prices: White House

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Echoing President Barack Obama, the White House has said there is no short term solution to rising fuel prices in America with external factors like booming economies of India, China and Brazil driving up global oil prices.

"The spike in the price of gas is related to the spike in the global oil market," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday, a day after Obama made such an argument at a campaign event in Florida to defend his energy policy amid record high gas prices.

"The impact of the global oil market is significantly outside the ability of anybody inside the United States to influence prices at that level," he said referring to the rising demand for oil in booming economies of China, India and Brazil.

"So the global oil market is influenced by the fact that in China, 10 million new cars were added to the roads in China in 2010," the White House spokesman said. "We're seeing a booming economy in India, where there is an increasing demand for oil in India."

"The key here to solving this problem over the long term ...is to make the United States of America finally independent of foreign energy," Earnest said

"It's the President's view that we can't drill our way out of this problem, that we need to avail ourselves of a wide range of options, all of which the President is pursuing," he said.

Obama's Republican challengers have seized on the opportunity offered by the rising gas prices to step up their attacks on his energy policies, including his rejection last month of a pipeline to carry oil from Canada to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.