California Gas Prices - $4/ gal - Part if Green Energy Plan?

There are many factors in gas prices, and almost all of them are exacerbated by the market's method of selling it, making speculators rich with very little risk.

 

Conservation is always a good thing, but the current administration, which criticized the previous administration for a 20% rise in gas prices, has seen almost a 100% rise.  Some think that is their goal.  If it is, it must also be their goal to collapse the economy and ensure their defeat in the next elections.

I think the higher gas prices are in the agenda of oil companies, who by the way are still making record profits, to make it appear that the current administration is keeping them high and therefore use it to drive them out of office. Oil companies are in the pockets of the GOP. The pipeline itself was not good for the environment, and the hype about it creating jobs was been debunked.

There is no real green energy plan out there, which has most of the liberals ticked off.

Oil reached $121 a barrel on the world market yesterday, ostensibly because Iran has stopped deliveries to the UK and France due to a threatened boycott of Iranian oil by the EU in the summer. Whether a boycott of Iranian oil will have a real impact on its nuclear plans is anybody's guess, but prices will go up even more simply due to the law of supply and demand.

Higher gasoline prices are hardly a U.S. thing. Super hit €1.64 a liter here yesterday ($2.18 per liter = $8.28 a gallon), diesel €1.53 a liter (= $7.71 a gallon).

Britain hasn't been getting much oil from Iran, and France hasn't been getting a lot.

 

The funny thing, of course, is that once the oil is on the tanker or in the pipeline, you can't tell who it belongs to, and it goes wherever it's bought.  And if Iran sell one barrel more to, oh, say, Russia, that's one less barrel someone else can sell Russia, so they have to sell it somewhere.  Oil is as fungible as money, in that respect.

 

But every dollar that barrel rises is driving another nail in President Obama's hope of re-election.

The only way Iran would have a real effect on oil prices is if they quit exporting oil completely or a blockade that would stop the export of oil from the mideast.  Iran's only real source of income is oil so it wouldn't last very long. Years of having the mullahs who don't have a clue about how a modern economy works have taken a huge toll on Iran's economy. This is all about speculators, everytime something happens in the mideast there is a rise in prices long before there is a real decrease in supply. In the U.S. because of the warm winter oil companies have been diverting supply to China and India to keep the price up.

My co-workers were talking about gas prices this morning. . .and they said that the increase in gas prices is a plot to make the voters approve a certain oil pipline (not sure where or what the name is, I was only half-listening). Which is hardly green! So I guess it depends on your perspective as to who gets the blame for this "plot".

The instability in the middle east is a major driving factor. When you have countries threatening to attack another, another country threatening to cut off some major passageways and the IAEA claiming Iran is enriching uranium for atomic weapons, you have a highly unstable region, one which supplies a significant amount of oil. It's not just Obama, not just the GOP and not just the speculators (although I do place a significant amount of blame there). 

 

All in all, to me it's greed at many, many different levels. 

Well, the instability is certainly driving the speculation.

 

Had the proposed laws regulating oil speculation (much higher margin costs) been passed, it would have helped some.