That's funny... as gasoline nears $4.00 a gallon, BrownTrout reports a 30% decrease in disposable income.

Instead of complaining that the oil companies are making "too much" profit reduce the cost of gas by

Drilling offshore.


Drilling in the ANWAR with its BILLIONS of barrels of oil.

Look into drilling other places, perhaps look to see if going after oil shale is economically viable.

Reducing taxes on oil. Currently they are around 27 - 64 cents per gallon.



Allowing gas stations to make as little profit as they chose. Many states have laws setting minimum profit margins - I think 8 cents per gallon?


Looking at the possibility of reducing the regulations the industry must comply with

Allow for more refineries

2many, I agree that some of the other things will help but not by much. The oil companies always say things like..."just because we make a significant increase in profit doesn't mean the cost of gasoline will decrease in return". Of course not. Why would they want to jump off the gravy train? I have said it before and I will say it again. SOMEONE is making some serious bucks, and it sure isn't us.

Honestly? You'd really rather destroy one of the few pristine places left in your country to temporarily alleviate gas prices which will inevitably increase in the future?

There is a finite amount of crude on this planet, and drilling your ANWR is only a band-aid solution to an oil dependancy problem.

Me, I take the loser cruiser (bus) and I'm buying a bike with my first paycheck, because I want to contribute to a clean future.

Big Oil and the Big O can't control the price of oil, even though OPEC really, really wants to. Oil prices are set by supply and demand in a global market.

Many people think OPEC controls oil prices, however, for at least three reasons:

OPEC certainly acts like it sets the price of oil. It holds meetings and issues press releases and sets "quotas" for its members.
Oil prices often go on bumping up and down like OPEC never existed.
It's obvious that the world's biggest oil producers can increase price by curtailing production.
Here's the catch: Any producer big enough to manipulate the market by slashing production can't benefit from the resulting higher price.

And any producer big enough to crash prices by increasing production will suffer from doing so.

If any country could control oil prices, it would be Saudi Arabia. This is why it can't.

People assume that if OPEC didn't exist, all major producers would open the spigot and produce oil at the maximum possible rate, which makes no sense whatever.
Oil producers behave exactly like producers in any other industry. When inventories are low and prices are high, they produce more. When inventories are high and prices are low, they produce less.

Nobody needs OPEC to tell them to do that.

Quoted from the EXPLORER. AAPG.org

I'm so glad I chose to live in a place where I can simply walk to work.

Here, gas is $4.87USD/gallon, and nobody here is really complaining. Thus, it's hard to impossible for me to have sympathy for you guys whining about high gas prices.

This is how the future will be. Get used to it.

The supply/demand issue has always been a weird one for me. I wasn't forced to take economics in school so I am uneducated in this aspect. Seems to me (the uneducated) that if the demand rises the so should the supply. As the demand falls (as it should from time to time) the supply should do the same. If this was a perfect world those would be the only two factors in the equation. But, the world being as it is, that isn't the case. There is the "war", the speculators, the analysts, and any other number of influences.

Just because you get comfortable with a higher price of gas doesn't mean you should sit back and not complain. Although, I think that complaining doesn't change anything. Maybe if we stopped complaining the oil companies would get confused. Hmmm, makes you wonder.

* sits down, quietly *

The problem is that supply and demand aren't directly related most of the time. Demand is how much people need or want the product and supply is how much of the product there is.

The company wants to produce just as much product to make the biggest profit based on the demand. In calculus, you figure out the maximum profit. If, for example, they charged 15 per gallon, they'd be giving out so much oil. But if they changed $15 per gallon, they wouldn't sell anything. So they have to pick a price that will allow a ton of people to buy, but also give maximum profit.

But this creates another problem as gas is almost a need, and oil is a natural resource that must a.) be found, b.) be refined, and c.) may run out of. Thus, the oil companies can charge an extreme amount and make out with a ton of profit because of the dependency the world has on oil. Plus, we're buying most of our oil from different countries, driving the cost up even further.

But, to answer your question specifically, demand right now is very high, because it is a "need." There's plenty of oil to go around, but because of inflation (particularly) and because of the fear of running out of oil, "supply" is extremely limited. But eventually, when the transition to alternative fuel becomes complete, the demand for oil will plummet, as will prices for oil.

The consumer has direct control over the price of oil if the "consumer" as a whole pull together. This means everyone would have to stop buying gas, thus driving the demand to zero in the U.S. However, this is never going to happen. So we're all just screwed.

Did that help at all? lol

Some people are whining but I think the vast majority (like me) are frustrated by the "sudden" dramatic increase in price and the utter lack of alternatives for many Americans.

Let's face it... America has the world's best highway system for a reason. Because it is the best (and sometimes ONLY) way to get from point A to point B in this country.

I'd LOVE to take public transportaion like trains or subways everywhere I go but the fact of the matter is - public transportation in this country is as inefficient as anything else run by the government.

Alternative fuel vehicles are just now making a dent in the market and the really efficient ones (like hydrogen powered vehicles) don't have the support infrastructure to make them work (when have you ever seen a hydrogen fuel station?).

Hybrids are a joke... you are swapping a huge gas bill for a huge electric bill. And sure... th ecar runs cleaner but where do you think that electricity is coming from? Largely from coal fired power plants that will have to ramp up output to account for people charging their green vehicles.

You are right that we're going to have to get used to it but I think the griping is largely justified. The transportation (and oil) industry continue to drag their feet and we're the ones who are over a barrel because of it (an oil barrel to be exact).

If a perfect world with boundless resources, supply would rise with demand. First year economics teaches you that when demand rises, supply probably won't but price sure will. When demand falls, supply might not but price will. Of course, this doesn't work when you introduce a price-fixing force such as government taxes or the CSO into the equation.

It would be great if, now that oil is in high demand, you Americans could magically find a gigantic new oil resevoir somewhere in America, but unless large quantities of oil can be extracted from shales starting yesterday, oil won't be abundant, and therefore cheap, for you.

The price of oil is not controlled by OPEC or big oil, it is controlled by futures traders. You can thank Goldman Sachs,et al for high commodity prices world wide.

I agree that hybrid/alt. fuel cars are a joke. Most of my fellow countrymen would never be able to use one, as these vehicles won't work in cold climates, either.

It's just surprising to see that people are surprised that choosing very unsustainable lifestyles is expensive.

If we tapped the Rockies, America would have the largest fuel reserve in the world. Granted, it's shale at this point, but even after conversion the Rockies would have the largest oil reserve in the world.
Rockies

It wouldn't be the biggest reserve in the world. It would be big, yes, but not the biggest. Heavy oil deposits in Canada that are not yet extractable contain more oil than the shales in the US, not to mention the countless oilshales worldwide that haven't been explored/mapped to any extent because they are not yet economic. [Bakken, Grosmont...etc]

I keep on top of these things. I'm a geologist, so it's my business to know who's doing what with rocks.

Do you really think that this will lower the price you pay at the pump? Sure, the oil companies would love to drill in the ANWR, but now that the know people are willing to pay $4/gallon or whatever it is that you pay, do you think they'll charge a little less because they have another billion or two barrels?

Are you really willing to let the ANWR, and the delicate ecosystem which it protects, be destroyed to see a few cents off the gas you pay at the pump? I personally don't think so. Sure, global warming is starting to destroy the tundra and permafrost, but drilling there will only hasten it's complete destruction.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by drilling offshore here; there are offshore drilling rigs in the US, so do you mean more?

What Trout said.

While the price is part of the issue, it is even more an issue because it is on a rather sudden rise. As you can see, in the year 2000, gas prices were "surging" at $1.54/gal, (at that time it was the highest it had been since 1981 when the "record high" was $1.38, this is a rise of 16 cents over the course of 19 years. That's less than a cent a year. It's $3.55 a gallon in NE Ohio right now, and we usually have some of the lower prices in the states. That's a rise of $2.01 in eight years, 25 cents a year (25 times faster a rise than previously).

So did we have it lucky for a while? Yeah. Are we still lucky? I guess. But the price has more than doubled in the last few years, and I don't forsee it slowing down any time soon.

This has been mentioned many times before but it seems appropriate again.

What we pay for things without any complaint:

Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 ... $10.32 per gallon
Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 ..........$9.52 per gallon
Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 ..... $10.17 per gallon
Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 ......... $10.00 per gallon
Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 ...... $33.60 per gallon
Vick' s Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 ... $178.13 per gallon
Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 .. $123.20 per gallon
Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 ........ . $25.42 per gallon
Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 .....$84.48 per gallon
And this is the REAL KICKER...

Evian water 9 oz $1.49..$21.19 per gallon! $21.19 for WATER and the buyers don't even know the source

When you compare the difficulty of providing diet tea to the consumer at over $10 a gallon with the difficulty of providing refined gas to the consumer at even $4 a gallon, where the legitimate complaint?

What is the profit margin to Snapple for the diet tea drink? Not to mention bottled water.

Yeah, but all of those have generic brand alternatives. And besides, who runs their car on any of that?

And no one complaining all those years that big oil with it's huge capital expenditures was making squat.

I'd be interested in hearing your definition of "squat".