Daily Inspiration Quote by John W. Snow

The most telling part is the throat-clearing: "Well, there's no doubt about the fact that, that..". Snow isn’t just stating an economic relationship; he’s trying to preempt a political fight. Higher energy prices are unpopular, and this sentence is built like a small rhetorical bunker, packed with certainty and repetition to make an uncomfortable premise sound inevitable, even reasonable.

The intent is classic economist-to-public translation: price signals work. Expensive energy nudges consumers to drive less, insulate more, buy efficient appliances, and generally treat energy as scarce. That’s "greater conservation" and "greater energy efficiency" framed as almost automatic outcomes, not choices made under stress. The subtext is where the persuasion happens: pain becomes policy. Instead of admitting that high prices are a tax-like burden, the line recasts them as a behavioral upgrade.

Then comes the crucial pivot: "useful role on the supply side". That’s the olive branch to producers and market hawks. High prices don’t just discipline consumers; they sweeten the economics of drilling, refining, and alternative energy investment. In other words, the same thing voters hate is also what makes new supply pencil out. "Useful" is doing a lot of work here, laundering a messy reality (windfall profits, volatility, inequality) into a tidy efficiency story.

Contextually, this reads like early-2000s energy politics: officials trying to defend market dynamics amid public anger over gas prices, while avoiding the more charged conclusion that stability, not just price, is what households and industries actually need to plan and adapt.