gas prices

I doubt that anybody in charge will listen, but Captain's Quarters gets the big picture:

Bush can call for all the investigations he wants, but all he will find is a ridiculous American energy policy that practically guarantees our inherent risk of market manipulation and foreign extortion...

Until we find ways to produce more crude in order to get more oil onto the market, the prices will continue to increase. Oil is, after all, a commodity -- a free-market product that will fetch the best price possible in trade. The more oil produced, the cheaper it will become. That mechanism does not rely on cost, either, except to the extent that high production costs would lower the amount of oil in the marketplace until prices rose high enough to cover the overhead.

If the US would start producing its own crude oil, then global prices would start dropping due to the increased worldwide supply and the drop in demand. We have vast fields of petroleum available for this purpose. Both coasts have proven oil deposits, and the Alaskan arctic area has stood ready for years to produce crude. In the case of our deposits off of the Florida coast, others such as Cuba may exploit those reserves instead. However, environmentalists refuse to allow for this production, forcing us to buy our oil elsewhere, artificially propping up prices and surrendering to the instability of the markets...

The main problem with gasoline prices is the number of varieties of gasoline that must be produced for local markets. Instead of having one single formulation, states have passed their own standards for the composition of gasoline, with various additives required in differing concentrations depending on where it is sold. If states all had their own refineries, this would present less of a problem...

So let's have an investigation, but let's not confine it to ExxonMobil's profit margin. Let's expand the probe into the bankruptcy of our energy policy for the past thirty years and the handcuffs we put on ourselves that force us to rely on unstable sources of crude oil and gasoline to meet our energy needs. Let's start getting realistic about those needs and start proposing rational methods of meeting them. Take the shackles off the US energy industry and allow us to shrug off the mullahs that control the world market.

(emphases mine)