As President Biden urges oil producers to open up the spigots, the White House climate czar, John Kerry, is denying the need for more supply, adding to the sense of an administration in disarray over how to lower gasoline prices. 

For the first time ever, according to AAA, the average national price for a gallon of gas passed $5 this weekend. The answer is obvious supply and demand: Increase supply and the price will fall.

Abba Eban, an Israeli politician and diplomat, remarked in 1967, “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

Last week, Mr. Biden finally behaved wisely, asking domestic oil companies in a letter to “take immediate actions to increase the supply” of gasoline and diesel fuels. 

Diesel, like gasoline, also hit a record this week, at $5.72 a gallon, up 75 percent over the past year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Because trucks run on diesel, shipping costs increase, adding to inflation and leveling a default tax to everything Americans buy at the store from food to durable goods to clothing.

The president has also repeated his complaint that suppliers are not drilling on all the permits they have to do so, on the heels of his “use it or lose it” threat earlier this year. 

As CNBC reported, though, refiners “can’t just ramp up output, with utilization rates already above 90 percent. Additionally, some refiners are now being reconfigured to make alternate products like biofuel,” favored by Mr. Biden’s green base. 

That companies can’t set up big rigs by snapping their fingers doesn’t fit with the quick-fix mentality of an administration desperate to ease pain at the pump, but the president has made his plea clear: Drill, baby, drill. 

Along those lines, he has called on both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to increase supply, which will be the purpose of his hat-in-hand visit to the Gulf nations in July.

He has even considered relaxing restrictions on international pariahs Venezuela and Iran — both hostile to America — to compensate for the shortfall caused by Russian sanctions.

The president had previously recognized the supply side by releasing a million barrels a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve starting in March.

That figure amounts to only about 5 percent of America’s daily use, but it had an impact on the price of oil when it began, underlining that the answer is to goose production.

The secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm, has towed this company line. “The president,” she told CNN, “is calling both upon production of oil to increase in the United States and around the world….”

One would expect John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, to be on the same page as the administration he works for, but he is not.

At the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, he offered what amounted to a stinging rebuke of Mr. Biden.

“Energy security worry,” he said, “is driving a lot of the thoughts now about, ‘Oh, we need more drilling. We need more drilling in this. We need to go back to coal.’

“No, we don’t. We absolutely don’t — and we have to prevent a false narrative from entering into this.” If the narrative is false, it comes from his boss.

Also, returning to coal happens to be just what European nations are doing to compensate for the loss of Russian oil and natural gas, bowing to the realities of having embargoed Moscow’s supplies.

Our modern economy runs on petroleum, not just for fuel but for lubricants, plastics, road surfaces, polyester, and millions of other products.

Any transition will take time, once green energy moves from the dreams and promises of the Green New Dealers and proves itself in the real world.

Mr. Kerry may think the future is now, and that he has the answers, but the private jets he prefers show he knows that no windmill will get him to Davos.

He serves at the pleasure of the president, and through him, the American people, who cannot fill their gas tanks today with Mr. Kerry’s promises of a green tomorrow.