05-21-07 by dugan
We can hear the screams of Illinois drivers as far away as LA. Gasoline refining profits that are hitting nearly $1 a gallon nationwide today shoved the national average price for a gallon of regular above $3.21 a gallon for regular—a figure that’s a new absolute record, with no asterisks about hurricanes or inflation rates or OPEC oil crises. On the AAA daily fuel price chart, Illinois even edged out California, $3.457 to $3.454.
Refining profits are more than double the average of the last five years. California is used to this abuse, but the rest of the nation is catching up–and catching on.
This morning, I stopped at LA’s big news radio station KNX, for a chat with business anchor Bob McCormick and oil industry spokesman Anita Mangels. She seriously claimed that the oil industry is competitive, that prices are just a result of those pesky “market forces” and that the oil industry is a leader in developing and producing biofuels. Come again? The CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, recently scorned ethanol, telling Fortune Magazine "I don’t have a lot of technology to add to moonshine."
Show me a station selling Chevron-branded E85 or Exxon-branded biodiesel and I’ll quit laughing. It’s the foot-dragging, hostility and obstruction of Big Oil that forces government to be the default agent for pushing green fuels. Despite all the greenwash in which Big Oil is now cloaking itself, it’s still just in the oil business.