This... :banghead:

Speculation is a part (always is), but China and India are still seeing tremendous demand growth. The good news is that compared to 2008, where the world supply had only a million barrel per day spare capacity, we now have a five million barrel per day spare.

The icky part is that the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico has reduced our production. It's over now, but permits are slow coming.

Well for one, it's still not as bad as it was then, I think some of you are forgetting how absurd the prices got in a very short amount of time. Add to that it was at the end of a lame duck trainwreck of a president's term, and the prices came back down as he was leaving office, and it's not a crazy theory.

But yeah, Obama is just as big of a tool, if it makes you feel better.

I don't think either president is truly at fault. Just saying that if you are going to blame one then you have to blame the other.

It still cracks me up that idiots out there held Bush responsible for gas prices and still considered him the dumbest president that ever held office.

You're probably right, because I don't think the POTUS is who really runs this country. I'll leave it at that to keep this out of DC though.

This administration has lumped shallow-well platforms in with deep-water drilling sites such that both are subject to the increased scrutiny by regulators. Without boring you with a bunch of technical crap about the
E & P sector of the Oil industry, the point is that the shallow wells (that would be on or near the continental shelf which are just hundreds of feet in depth vs the thousands of feet in deep-water sites), actually have the all important BOP (blow out preventer) on the platform above sea-level just like on land-based drilling rigs vs being thousands of feet deep as the Horizon platform was.
This is no accident, it's the Tree-Huggers in the Obama adminstration tieing up the industry and preventing it from producing that much needed domestic oil production and in turn causes us having to import more which is bad for jobs, bad for tax revenues, and bad for national security if those increased oil imports origionate in unfriendly places like the MidEast.....FWIW ?

Boring me? This stuff makes my perineum tingle. That being said, while politics does play a part in resulting crude prices, please let's not get too specific and drive this to SC.

And it went right back up as Obama entered office. Not immediately, but its been a gradual climb over the past 2 yrs.

A lot of the blame is due to inflation.

I think alot of the blame is on the dumbasses who keep raising the gas prices. **** those guys! I don't have anymore ****ing money.

I think alot of the blame is on the dumbasses who keep restricting access to domestic petro supplies which raise the gas prices. **** those guys! I don't have anymore ****ing money.

If that's whats going on, then yeah! **** those guys! I wanna burn their houses down, but I can't afford the gas to burn it down with! I don't have anymore ****ing money.

Was just in Hawaii & gas is now over $4/gallon in Honolulu.

Whew......Thank God the Ocean wasnt destroyed and the world never ended, like predicted. It could have taken years to get those permits back!

$3.59 in NorCal right now. It will be pushing $4 by Memorial Day I would bet.

BY SAMEER MOHINDRU
SINGAPORE—The run-up in global commodity prices is stirring debate in a number of countries over the role of financial speculators, a prospect that could fuel a regulatory backlash by governments keen to control food prices.

The prices of many commodities undoubtedly would have risen anyway in response to recent supply disruptions and rising demand. But some political leaders are raising questions about how much investors such as commodities traders and hedge funds might be contributing to the run-up. That could leader to anger among consumers and draw yet more fire from politicians on the dangers of derivatives trading.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...LEFTSecondNews