About gas: prices have more than tripled in 5 years, which is simply outrageous. Nothing else has ever increased in price that much that fast in the US in our history.Keep in mind that oil is pumped out of the ground and the costs of extracting it have not tripled. Are the Arabs gouging us or are the oil companies simply reaping larger profits? This is important because our entire economy can be destoyed by high fuel costs. Its already happening.
It's called supply and demand; the demand has gotten much bigger since China and India began using cars in a big way. That will get only worse (or better, depending on your point of view.)
I read somewhere a couple of years ago that it cost ~$10 to deliver a barrel of oil to the US east coast. (That's pumping, transport, etc.) Everything else is essentially a tax by exporting nations, or profit for somebody (not necessarily the oil companies, but also commodities speculators, etc.) The recent run-up, above $100 a barrel, can mostly be attributed to speculators, as I understand it. This is making the exporting nations nervous, because if prices get too high -- and out of their control -- then there will be a big move to conserve, smaller cars, etc., and prices will begin spiralling down. Their ideal condition is to sell oil at as high a price as possible, without encouraging profit-damaging conservation measures.
The "tax-and-profit" thing is one reason that some economists and politicians have argued that the US needs a big whopping gas tax -- say $1 a gallon. They argue that *somebody* is going to push the price to the edge of sustainability, so it might as well be us. That way, we'd collect the tax, rather than the exporting nations.
Oil (in my view) is the underlying cause of the US involvement in the Middle East; it's a struggle over who will control oil flow. We talk about justice and democracy, but you'll notice that we didn't intervene in the Rwanda genocide of a few years back, when even a very small force of a few thousand soldiers might have broken up the killing in a matter of days or a couple of weeks (as the soldiers from Burundi later did.) We went after Hussein because he explicitly threatened the oil flow when he invaded Kuwait; we confront Iran for the same reason; we fight Al Queda not only because of 9-11, but because they were (and maybe still are) a popular force in Saudi Arabia.
The failure of major importing nations to create reasonable energy policies is one of the most politically unsettling problems in the world. It's not only the US, but the US is a major factor in it. If the US government created a protected coal-to-oil industry, and encouraged more alternative fuels, and combined those policies with a requirement that all cars be plug-in hybrids, and perhaps added an excise tax for cars over certain horsepowers, we could essentially be energy independent in fifteen or twenty years, and between now and then, the prices we pay for gasoline would steadily decline. That won't happen because our political situation is such that we need a crisis before anybody will act, and $4 gas is not quite a crisis.
JC
