Just want to weigh in again on this topic. Some good points have been made,
but it is not just supply and demand driving the prices up. Part of it as
said is the problem with refineries, due to ecological concerns no new
refineries have been built in America for a loong time. The same goes for
nuclear power plants for electricity. If these ecological concerns were put
aside, new more efficient refineries could be built and there could be a
bigger better supply of gasoline if there was an increased supply of crude
(say opening the reserves, allow limited drilling in Alaska, or even allow
offshore drilling off the coast of Kalifornia). Government taxes on gas are
not going to go away, how do you think the roads you drive on are funded?
Plowing, repair, maintenance, new construction all takes money and on the
state level there are usually provisions on gas tax that ear mark them for
road expenses.
Where the government needs to get it's "stuff" together is eliminating the
12 or so different blends used around the country (this excludes Kalifornia
because that one state alone regulates something like 26 different blends of
gas based on county or air quality or some other BS) like here in Wisconsin
we have some counties that mandate the 10% ethanol blend and some don't, we
also have to have a "winter" blend that is supposed to be more resistant to
freezing. All these different blends make it hard for refineries to
efficiently produce gas from crude. If there were say 2 or 3 different
blends it would allow the gas to go to the part of the country where demand
was highest, as it is now if a refinery has extra gas for say Florida but it
is a special blend they need to sit on it until it can be sold in Florida,
whereas if there were just a few universal blends they could ship it to say
Georgia.
Also the oil companies and gas companies are guilty of being crookeder than
sin. Just earlier this summer there was that storm in the Gulf of Mexico,
everyone was worried about it causing havoc with the oil supply. Gas prices
went up something like 15 or 20 cents a gallon over night. When the storm
passed and did not make landfall as much as feared did prices drop 15 to 20
cents overnight? Hell no, they use the pending catastrophes to jack prices
up but they are as transparent as can be when the "catastrophe" doesn't
happen.
Rant over,
-Joe
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