Baby, You Can Drive My Car...

...if you can afford the gas, of course...

Gas pump price pressure

BY TOM INCANTALUPO
Newsday Staff Writer

April 11, 2006


Driving is the most expensive it's been since the fall as drivers and experts alike wonder how high gasoline prices will march.

High crude oil costs and a near-perfect storm of other factors have prices rising particularly steeply this spring -- by 37 cents a gallon in the past month compared with about 20 cents a year ago -- when warm weather brings motorists out of hibernation.

[...]"We will see or we will have seen $3-a-gallon gas in every state by Memorial Day," said Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, an energy risk management company in New Canaan, Conn. "Some of the cheap places will escape it, but you guys [on Long Island] have high prices."

Yesterday's Long Island average for regular unleaded, $2.855 a gallon in the AAA's daily survey of stations, was the highest since Oct. 18. Although that was still well short of the record $3.347 a gallon set last Sept. 11 after Hurricane Katrina disrupted petroleum operations in the Gulf of Mexico, nobody could rule out seeing that again this year.

Thank you, Captain Obvious!

Look, anyone who's driven a car for any length of time knows that prices jack up twice a year: in May, and in October when the MTBE formulae are released for lower emissions. Does it surprise anyone that, like global warming forcing the seasons, people are driving more earlier in the season as the weather turns nicer earlier?

Now add to this the unrest in Nigeria, the uncertainty over Iran-American relations, and in particular how this immature bunch of redneck cowboys is going to behave over the next few months, and you can see why gas is jumping like a cricket on a hot stove.

The OPEC oil strategy is working to a T. The US energy policy...you remember we have one, right? Cooked up in a back room with lobbyists and Dick Cheney, with George Bush's blessing?...The US energy policy has been shown to be flawed and basically relies on one thing: praying ANWR has enough oil to tide us through until we can pump oil out of Iraq (and maybe now Iran).

Idiots.

snarkasm, snarcasm, snarky

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