Many Americans are understandably upset and angry.

Upset and angry I buy. But "understandably"? No.

Americans are irrationally upset and angry. This has been coming for a long, long time, as anyone who travels, reads (good) newspapers, or is simply interested in events outside the US of A could tell you.

I'll never "understand" willful ignorance.

Let me try a re-write:

Many Americans are contemptibly upset and angry at something they should have headed off at the pass sometime in the eighties (like most other 1st World nations at least made an attempt to do).

"It also plays to the advantage of local refineries by limiting their competition -- a Government Accountability Office study asserted that California gas prices were 7 cents higher than the national average for this very reason. "

At $4 a gallon seven cents is nothing compared to the environmental benefits.

Tonight an CBS news report suggests that the profit margin on SUV's is about ten times what it is on small cars. (You do the math). The big three would rather sell us SUV's and then take away our driving privileges. You paid $40k for something you cannot drive? It looks so good sitting there in your driveway! And when your home is foreclosed you can live inside, try doing that in vintage VW beetle?

No its not the world we live in, in the world THEY live in, should gasoline be sold at free market prices to the highest bidder? Would they rather sell more, or make it up on less volume, when there is a finite supply available?

Sometime we must consider the converse of the supply/demand equation, which goes something like this, if you are an OPEC oil supplier your reasoning might be, gee I am selling less oil, I better charge more money to make up the difference. (Okay people are using less gasoline why isn't the price going down, professor?)

Scarcity arises from a lack of demand.

And what you get for seven cents may be priceless, including clean air.

Whatever happened to this? Explain why the Saudi Royal family isn't putting a sizable chunk into the futures market. Oil Company CEOs?

""This is one reason why accusing oil companies such as Exxon and Chevron of gouging the consumer misses the point. ""

IT'S BUSH!!! IT'S BUSH!!! it's bush???

Global oil production has plateaued at 86 million barrels a day, or just over a cubic mile per year. Demand for oil has been increasing at about 2% per year. This is why gas prices are increasing. Beginning about now, global oil production will begin the decent toward terminal depletion. As soon as production dips, gas prices will skyrocket. So these are the good old days of cheap gas. Worse, there are no real alternatives, as documented in this free, updated, and well documented report: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

This easily readable article made sense to me. However, I think an important point could be added: the devaluation of the American dollar relative to other currencies. Since much of our oil is imported, we have to pay the foreign sellers of oil more dollars to match the value of other currencies. This is part of the increase in price of a barrel of oil denominated in dollars. A dozen eggs now cost me 50% more dollars than a year ago. (The cheapest eggs I could buy locally a year ago were $1.19 and are now $1.79.) Of course, gasoline is up too, by, what? 33%? This is inflation, and it will feed back to the expense of doing business in the U.S. Ultimately, foreign sellers of oil will want more dollars for their oil partly to keep up with inflation. So along with (possibly) peak oil and increased global demand for oil, you have to add in our own declining value of the dollar vs. foreign currencies. A year ago a U.S. dollar could buy $1.06 in Canadian dollars. Today a U.S. Dollar buys $0.99 Canadian. So a Canadian seller of oil (Canada is the largest oil vendor to the U.S.) will want more U.S. dollars just to cover for inflation. Worthy of note is that the flood of U.S. dollars to China for consumer goods and to Canada for oil without the dollars coming back to the U.S. in purchases by foreign holders of the dollars is helping to create this inflation. How many dollars can foreigners have before they begin to think nothing of lighting their cigars with them?

How can we make dollars more valuable to foreigners (i.e. cut inflation)? We have to decrease what we spend overseas (for example, import less oil) or export more.

The U.S. government is borrowing back U.S. dollars from foreign holders to finance our deficit spending because our revenue (taxes) does not cover all that we are spending. Foreign holdings of U.S. dollars by those who supply oil will become less valuable as they accumulate. Those foreign dollar holders will then want more dollars per barrel that they sell, and they will want a higher payback to lend dollars back to the U.S.

Oil prices have gone from the mid $20 range in the fall of 2002 to $131 today, a rise of over $100/barrel in just over five years. Consumption has not increased 500% in that time.

The collapse of the dollar, due to major deficits, and huge borrowings to fight our two terrible wars, has decimated the dollar--as the value of the dollar collapses, the price of oil, priced in dollars will go up.

Speculation in the oil markets, like the New York Mercantile Exchange, and fears of a wider war in the Middle East, have far more to do with oil pricing than supply and demand. As the Saudi oil minister correctly pointed out (after Bush's begging for an increase in production went for naught) supply and demand are roughly in balance.

If McCain gets elected, with his warmongering tendencies, hysteria over Iran, and complete unwillingness to regulate the futures markets, the price of oil will remain astronomical for some time to come. (See the recent articles on oil pricing at Counterpunch by Dave Lindorff and Ralph Nader.)