U.S. gas prices have hit their highest level ever for springtime, at $3.96 a gallon for regular on average. Yep, higher even than the record surge in 2008, as oil companies reap near-record profits. So…
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Archive | All Oil
RSS feed for this sectionIs There a ‘Gashole’ in Your Tank?
The price of gasoline is up a dollar in the last year to $3.83 a gallon nationally. Good time to see a strange, funny, disturbing documentary called “Gashole” about how this happens. Who knew that Congressional hearings featuring oil company CEOS could be simultaneously hilarious and horrifiying? Or that “Reefer Madness” provides a clue to how oil companies distract us from the real issues?
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$4.00 Gas: It’s Not Just the Oil Price
Oil companies are making a fortune off of drivers with oil at $109 a barrel (which comes to $2.60 a gallon at 42 gallons per barrel). But they’re getting rich a second time refining the oil into gasoline.
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Gas Prices Keep Soaring As U.S. Fuels Other Countries’ Growth
California-based nonprofit, Consumer Watchdog, recently provided a clue to where the “missing” gasoline may have gone. Recently, Judy Dugan, a petroleum market commentator for Consumer Watchdog, noted that the shares of oil refiners jumped in price last month “on bets that Japan would soon have to import a lot more heating oil and gasoline because of refinery fires and quake/ tsunami damage.”
$4.00 Gasoline: Let’s Bet Against the Future
Monday’s jump in oil prices to more than $108 a barrel, with the price of gasoline above $3.66 a gallon for regular ($4.06 in California), triggered a flood of news stories. But the dry, just-the-facts…
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Japan Meltdown: Human Error Starts in the Boardroom
I remember days and nights spent at a rewrite desk in Washington 25 years ago, taking in and editing nearly unbelievable information from reporters in Russia and Western Europe. Where was this place, Chernobyl? Was…
Refiners Licking Their Chops Over Japan
With perhaps ten thousand lives lost and a nuclear reactor emergency growing daily in Japan, one industry is poised to reap huge profits from tragedy. The stocks of oil refiners charged upward today on bets…
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Absolute Gasoline Price Record in 2011?
The federal agency that tracks energy prices is predicting record annual gasoline prices for 2011–$3.56 per gallon on average for the full year, higher than the economy-wrecking $3.35 per gallon average price of 2008. The…
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Five Actions to Cut Gasoline Prices
An uprising in Libya is not causing your wallet to bleed at the gas pump. The U.S. buys virtually no oil from Libya. Egypt and Tunisia, the other hotspots, don’t even produce oil. There’s still…
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Facts of Life On High Gas Prices: It’s the Speculators & Oil Companies To Blame Not Middle East
While skirmishes in Libya and uncertainty in the Middlie East are nice cover for outrageous gasoline prices, the fact is the same old suspects are making a killing from sky-high gas prices approaching $4 dollars per gallon in California: big oil companies and greedy speculators.
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Glenn Beck is Raising Your Gasoline Prices
Ok, it’s not all Glenn Beck’s Fault that you’re paying $3.40 or $3.70 or even $4.00 a gallon at the pump. But his fear-based take on democracy movements in the Middle East (oh, the caliphate!)…
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$4 Gas? Blame the Big-Bucks Lobby–and the White House
There aren’t many oil analysts who still deny that speculation, and the sheer volume of speculative trades in energy commodities, drives up the price of oil and gasoline. But there’s an army of financial and…
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Do You Know Where Your Gas Taxes Are Going?
Here’s a kind of story that rarely gets reported without a specific combination of expert industry and legal knowledge and a nose for news: In Washington State, the government is passing along gas taxes to…