galfordo said:
Let's see how much damage gas does to galfordo and his little bitch-ass 4 cyrindar

....
~28 gallons/month (I use a tank about every two weeks)
~1.30 when Bush took office (correct me if I'm wrong here)
~1.75 now
.35*28*12 = $117.60
WTF, man??!! That's two good MVS games
I thought we were fighting this war to get extra oil??? Wouldn't this drive the price down?
The major culprit of the price hikes is OPEC...as a profit driven cartel and they'll cut production, while driving prices into the sky as they see fit.
Releasing the national oil reserve is useless....OPEC would just counter-balance that and cut production futher to counterbalance that effort and keep prices at the same level.
Killing the gasoline tax isn't viable because they'd just do the same and except they'd be pocketing a few extra cents directly.
We could try and play a game of political strong arm with OPEC but in the end that could possibly result in a situation similar to what happened during the 1970's oil crisis.
The only real way to reduce energy prices is to get more oil from non-OPEC producing countries, like Venezuela, the with drilling rights in the North Sea, Russia, and our own sources even though the Alaskan reserves are insanely controversial so we're not likely to touch that anytime soon. While simutaniously researching alternative energy so we can at least eventually move away from Oil in terms of power generation, therefore freeing more of it up for transportation, heating and everything else.
Basically there's no way out of this except for technological progress, conservation, exploration of our own domestic sources, the pacific rim, antartica and our government sweet talking certian key countries in South America and Russia.
Some scientists are actually starting to get a bit excited about Russia and some think that continued exploration will eventually prove that the Russian oil reserves could rival or exceed the amount of Oil found in the Middle East. I'm just glad this is starting to come to light after the Soviet Union fell
That said the short term analysis is that prices are going to keep rising past historic levels throughout the summer driving season, hit a wall in August, settle down in the fall, and then they'll rise back up to obnoxious levels just in time for home heating oil sales in the winter.