Crossing the line: U.S. national gas price average officially goes over $4/gallon
Photo by Cyfer13. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.
Depending on where you live, this may seem like old news. As the photo above (taken by Flickr user Cyfer13 on May 24 in San Francisco) shows, gas has been over $4 a gallon in some areas for a while now. But the official word has now been declared: the U.S. national average is now above $4 a gallon (officially, the number reached $4.005 on Friday, the AAA and the Oil Price Information Service announced). This is the first time gas prices have reached that barrier. But, speaking of old news, the AP story declaring this state of affairs, contains this nugget, "Prices at the pump are expected to keep climbing, especially after last week's furious surge in oil prices." That surge and all of the money being traded in energy these days has resulted in the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission opening a probe into potential price manipulation. Any results from that investigation will take a while. For now, Cyfer13 can see the writing on the wall. His or her caption to the photo reads, "Sadly, in a couple of months...this may be cheap."
[Source: AP]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
A.Brien 2:30PM (6/09/2008)
Quote:Any results from that investigation will take a while.
Why they are putting delays for the results of an investigation??? It can take a long time or it can take one day. In my opinion this investigation is just a cover-up to increase the price even more and then kill anyone that can put on the market some new energy source. These energy providers are just plain criminals that are afraid of someone having cheap energy source of their own. This racket is there since 1920 and the automobile manufacturers and goverments are associate criminals.
There is numurous solutions, especially green algae biofuel and hydrogen from water. Any student of 10-12 years old can experience it and understand it. A car can be autonomus with a simple water electrolyser on-board the car with exhaust condensation and recirculation like the u.f.o of the era before earth.
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meme 3:15PM (6/09/2008)
If you want expensive fuel solutions, you can't do much better than algae biofuel and hydrogen. And, in case you're not aware, it generally takes 3-10 years to get a new fuel plant of any sort online.
It's unfortunate, but there are no magic bullets. There are a lot of good things we can do for the *long term*, but they're just that -- long term. Had we been wiser and put in the money when oil prices were low, we wouldn't be in the situation we're in now, but we're in this situation now and have to deal with the consequences, like them or not.
Also, since you seem to have misinterpreted:
"Why they are putting delays for the results of an investigation???"
They're not "putting delays" in; the "delays" are the time it takes to conduct the investigation. The world is currently trading 4.2 *trillion* dollars of oil per year, in every country on the planet, with tens of millions of people involved, most of them not in America. You think you can figure out the books on that overnight?
Want to know the biggest thing the government could do to fix oil prices in the short to mid term? Stop the plummeting slide of the US dollar. It's the largest single driver in world oil prices. Unfortunately, that in itself isn't an easy situation to deal with, either.
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Dan 4:55PM (6/09/2008)
I like the clever framing making the red arrow pointing directly at the $5 gas.
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Chris 7:27AM (6/10/2008)
the commodities "investigation" is just another do nothing dance by the Democratic controlled Congress.
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