05-04-07 by dugan
Hawaii’s politicians are acting to take some control over gasoline prices. Why can’t California’s lawmakers do it?
Hawaii’s gasoline price averages just under $3.25 today, says the AAA fuel gauge website. Not cheap, not even reasonable, but more than 20 cents below the California average. And as of July 1, Chevron, Tesoro and a local wholesaler say they’ll take prices down at least another 10 cents.
The reason? In part because Hawaii is reinstating a tax break for part-ethanol fuels. But that’s not the larger story. The state is also requiring much more information from refiners about their operational costs and profits. That’s really scary to profiteers, as in: “Here’s what it costs Chevron to make gasoline — and here’s the true profit.”
Not enough of that new info will be passed on to the public, but you can bet it will leak here and there. I can’t wait to see the investigative stories in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, which recently front-paged stories on the state’s charge that Chevron “willfully obstructed the state’s gasoline price investigation, withheld key profitability
documents, orchestrated deceptive press campaigns and lied to the Legislature.” That kind of expectable oil company behavior will be a lot harder under the new state law.
So chalk up another, albeit small, progressive benefit in the Aloha State. (It already has near-universal health care).
