Reading Energy News on a Friday Afternoon

Michael Giberson

The Washington Post ran a good story on gasoline prices on the front page of today’s edition.

But the following sentence caught my eye, and raised perhaps imponderable questions: “In the absence of a clear explanation, members of Congress have jumped into the fray.”

After enough members of Congress jump into a fray, does the absence of a clear explanation go away?

I wonder how many members of Congess it would take to fill up a fray.

Tell you what, let’s let them keep jumping into the fray, and when it is full let’s slap a lid on it.

5 thoughts on “Reading Energy News on a Friday Afternoon”

  1. It was certainly nice to see a newspaper article that even brought up the facts about the years of excess capacity and low margins in this extremely cyclical industry rather then just automatically taking the administrations talking point that it was all due to government regulations.

  2. No clear reason why prices are rising? I can think of 2 reasons right off the bat.

    Let’s see. The phasing in of ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel just began. Could it be that refiners are not executing the phase in very well?

    MTBE has just been banned, and refiners need to switch over to ethanol. Ethanol costs almost twice as much as oil, per barrel.

    I love all the news stories in the Chicago media about how much gas costs. The lazy journalists go out to some gas station somewhere downtown, and find some gas selling for $3.10 a gallon. Meanwhile, out in the ‘burbs, I’m paying $2.89 a gallon.

    Now, one might be curious as to why there is such a discrepancy in gas prices in so short a distance. But then, if you were curious, you wouldn’t be a journalist.

    Counties and towns in Illinois can charge local gas taxes. Chicago and Cook county both levy gas taxes. DuPage county and my town do not.

    Democrats control Chicago and Cook country. We’re all Republicans out here. Yet those Chicago Democrats are the ones who want to investigate “Big Oil”. Why not drop the gas tax?

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