How to make the price of gas go down

I was reading where Obama drops a couple percentage points in the polls evey time the price of gas goes up. He's going to be the "gas president!" What a legacy!

Now the price of gas going up is a favorite focus of armchair economists everywhere, me included. Who benefits from the price of gas going up? Well, in the first place, it's your big multi-national oil companies.

Exxon and all her little brothers and sisters have oil wells all over the world that were profitable when oil was twelve dollars a barrel.

Now that oil is $120 a barrel, do you think it is more profitable or less profitable for Exxon and the other sisters?

I remember when the first wave of Alberta oil sands development was coming off the drawing boards and into the oil-field service shops that I worked in. $12 a barrel was the magic number.  No wonder they're expanding those tar-sands as fast as they can; if they were breaking even at twelve bucks a barrel, what are they doing now?

Meanwhile, we've got an entirely new dimension to consider; fracked shale.

Nobody has any idea how big that's gonna get. Some of your more educated states have concluded that when fracking chemicals show up in drinking water, that's a cause for putting a moritorium on fracking. Luckily the oil industry can then move right along to the next state, where they don't rush to such hasty conclusions.

Bottom line, thanks to fracking technology, ( and so sorry about your tap water, but I'm sure there's no connection...) America is awash in energy as never before!

Well, it's about that global oil market. As you know, way too much of that global oil has to pass through the Straits of Hormuz just to get to your local gas station. And we all know who is on the other side of those Straits.

Iran.

Everytime somebody in the GOP race makes idle threats against Iran, oil traders bid up the price of oil. Everytime Obama talks about all options on the table, oil traders bid up the price of oil. Everytime Netanyahu invokes his holocaust vocabulary to talk about Iran, oil traders bid up the price of oil.

Want lower gas prices?

Stop talking shit about Iran!