Too bad no one likes nuclear.

If they market at the common prevailing price, it is called price-fixing. If they raise prices, it's price-gouging. If they lower them, it's anti-competitive dumping.

You can't win when the fundamental issue is excess greed ... of a public that expects, with sickening entitlement-sense, that other people absorb the time, costs and risks to drill, pump, transport, refine, distribute, and market and retail a substance globally.

Oil company profit margins are lower than most others' too, I believe even at the current rates of revenue.

It's economic-ignorance demogoguery time.

Shush, Col.

We Americans live in a magical land where the gasoline fairies sprinkle refined petroleum products to our front door with no overhead and no consequences. If something positively horrible happens, like if we can't afford driving Junior to soccer practice twice a week, then obviously there must be a malevolent entity responsible.

Matthew-

I think you'll find that the prevailing wisdom is that consumers are incapable of greed - only Big Business/Big Oil are.

poor phrasing but you know what I mean.

Everyone is, of course, correct. It's fun and easy, if silly, to bash big oil.

Having said that, there are some very weird incentives built into the global oil market. It is an odd industry in which profits are directly related to the cost of inputs.

In one respect, I think there is a legitimate complaint. Oil prices aren't driven by supply and demand in the traditional sense. They're mostly driven by perceived excess capacity. Thus, there is something of a disincentive to bring new production capacity on-line in response to higher prices.

This is particularly true now. In the past oil producers (the Saudis in particular) were uncomfortable with the idea of expensive oil. The thinking was that oil much in excess of $35 would cause an economic meltdown and over-stimulate new capacity growth, thus bringing prices crashing down again. But now that everyone's learned the world economy can function pretty well with $60 oil, there's little incentive to do anything to bring prices back down.

The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one . . . The President also believes that the American people's use of energy is a reflection of the strength of our economy, of the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy.
--Ari Fleischer, 2001