My former comments (see my former post on this thread) reflected my thoughts about increased gas prices. I see in the meantime many comments have been made that may or may not be interpreted as "political" depending on one's particular point of view or "opinion" on the higher gas prices.
It occurred to me (for reasons stated below) that you cannot separate some things from politics ---- national energy policies (or lack of them), global warming (or lack of it), alcohol fuel, etc being just some of those.
I've been interested in future energy sources issues for several years, and have done some research on the topic over tiime, so the oil prices increases and consequent gas price rises in US (and elsewhere) do not come as a surprise considering that the 5 largest proven reserves are in countries of Middle East, and exports from these countries are also.... and they're OPEC members. World consumption projections have been known for several years... yet OPEC exports began to be curtailed (reduced) ... OPEC decision... not due to problems in production. As the demand continued to grow at predicted rates, the marginal difference between supply and demand began to be reduced. This put crude oil production rates marginally much tighter relative to consumption rates. Whenever marginal supply exist the price always rises due to uncertainties of production meeting demand.... and the tighter the margins the greater the price, even if production meets demand.
Given known predicted increases in demand (which aren't out of range of the projections at the time, by the way), there were steps taken by Saudi's to increase supply... but not necessarily with sufficient lead-times to insure they could keep up with demand increases in time... and why shouldn't they? The tighter the margin of supply to demand the greater the price premium due to uncertainties... and this isn't due to "speculation", but simple risk premiums.
For some facts.... the US's proven oil reserves amount to 2.9 years worth of total US oil consumption at current rate of consumption... so even if all the offshore and wild-lands in Alaska and elsewhere were immediately pumping it all out, it amounts to a pitance in world consumption... and a pitance in US consumption since US has by far and wide several times over the largest per-capita consumption --- that's why we have such a high relative standard of living.... more lighting, more single family dwellings built further and further from places of business and employment (since we have lots of undeveloped but habital environment land ... a geographic uniqueness of US, plenty of readily available supply of water (though draughts can bring some areas to their knees so to speak), greater use of air conditioning, etc. Consumer's don't use the bulk of oil energy supplies by the way... commerce does, so transportation (trucking, rail-roads, airborn), and mfg'ing and businesses use the most by far. Oil consumption by consumers is greatest for home heating, less so for personal transportation.
Fact is that only 3% of oil consumption is used for electrical production, so switching to electrical cars won't reduce oil consumption. Almost 50% of electrical energy in this country is supplied by coal burning plants... nuclear and natural gas make up mearly all the rest... the remaining electrical energy is supplied by hydro-electric with tiny, tiny amount supplied by wind, solar, and geothermal sources.
Point is only that politics on what we do to utilize resources without also impacting the environment (at least not making it worse than it already is... not to mention improving it any), while also obtaining and attracting the financing to build the infrastructure to deal with switching to electrical energy sources for consumer transportation is a political issue. If we switch to major electrical transportation forms for consumer transportation it will reduce reduce oil consumption somewhat for consumer tranportation (personal transportation---- car's, pick-ups, SUV's, etc) but only to the level that electrical energy is used in place of the gasoline engine, but it will certainly require major investments in more coal fired (but that means either more dirty coal burning plants or clean coal plants ... which is more expensive (per kWhr) than the dirty coal plants..., nuclear (but that brings up major environmental issues), and/or natural gas consumption... which will increase overall demand for natural gas and hence price thereof.
Switching to ethanol using corn is a fiasco (imo, politically geographically beneficial, rather then energy motivated) as it uses nearly as much energy to produce the ethanol from corn as it provides so net delta in energy consumption is marginal at best, and given limits to arible (sp?) land and corn belt not using irrigation systems it makes corn more expensive for food-stuffs and other corn based products... means meat prices, milk prices, etc must go up. Brazil's use of ethanol from cane is far more efficient energy wise... about 4-5 times more energy supplied from cane than it uses to produce it... and cane isn't used for human and meat products (animal) consumption other than for sugar content.... so Brazil's energy independance using their combination of cane for ethanol and their oil production (which isn't a minor part of their total energy consumption, btw) is not applicable to the US as a model.
One thing we can count on absolutely... energy costs, regardless of the raw sources, will continue to increase in relative cost terms, OPEC will continue to insure a marginal delta between world demand and world supply to their own economic benefit, and switching to alternative energy sources in US will not be without it's costs... major ones... and the question is only who's going to pay the bill for it.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
