Re: E-85

Chumango wrote:

Oil companies make about 10 cents profit per gallon. So if you completely removed that profit, how much less would gas cost? 10 cents. That's it. What really irritates me is that so many people think it is evil for the oil companies to make a profit on a product the consumer wants, while it is perfectly OK for the government to earn 3 to 4 times as much per gallon, and they did nothing to obtain, refine, and distribute that product. Go figure. And the record profits are due to - you guessed it - record gallons sold. Gasoline demand continues to rise.

This is not a true picture. The oil companies are claiming to only make 10 cents per gallon. Lets look at the monies that they are spending in buying back stock and the dividends being paid back. . Exxon for example paid out 37.2 billion in dividens and stock buy backs yet only spent 3.3 billion on its capital investments. And then the oil company wants to blame the slow production and pipeline failures as a reason to raise the gas prices. They are not reinvesting in their productions, maintenaces, pipelines and alternative fuels. The monies is going to themselfs.

Granted that the USA uses 25 percent of the worlds oil and the second largest user is China at 7 percent. That is a LARGE amount of oil for one country. So an attitude ajustment is needed in America today. But, look at the oil compaines profits for the top 5 oil companies in the US. The Presidents 2005 energy bill did nothing but drive up the oil prices. Since that time the top five oil companies posted record profits. The White House explicitly rejected efforts to imporve fuel economy standards for cars and trucks. This is around 60 percent of our fuel usage by the way. Now the Supreme Court ruled that the present administration has failed to adequately regulate car and truck emissions. Now there is a call for bio fuels and better CAFE rules.

One can argue Economics will work better than regulation and when the the price of fuel reaches 5 dollars per gallon, I think then we will see people start buying smaller cars, getting rid of their "gas toys", riding thier bikes to work and just plain changing thier attitudes on our petro usage.