I have been getting e-mails on how to bring down the price of gas since it first went over $2.00 per gallon. Don't buy gas on Tuesdays, Don't buy from this company or that, impeach the president, etc. Novel ideas, I suppose, but all totally ineffective.

It doesn't matter which day you buy gas, you're STILL buying it! American oil companies have a certain amount of control over prices, but very little as it would affect prices at the pump. The government has NO control over the price of oil no matter the name of the guy in the oval office. All they can do is create laws to curtail the amount of money a business can make by taxing profits which will only make matter worse. No, there are many factors involved in the price of oil. Actual prices that reflect investment to return, supply, demand, capacity, speculation and gasoline taxes.

Let's take Exxon, for example. The largest oil company in the world that everyone is harping on for their earnings controls about 2% of oil in America and it's after tax earnings in 2007 were about 40 billion dollars with a 10% net profit margin(half a percent less than 2006), which is pretty good, but those earnings are spread in many aspects of the petroleum market of which the sale of gasoline is only a part. This is a corporation that was on the verge of bankruptcy ten years ago. It was turned around by more effective and streamlined management under the hand of Rex Tillerson and had little to do with the price of gas shooting up. Not buying gas from Exxon for a month would not have a significant effect on their earnings. Not buying from them on a particular day of the week would have NO effect as you would still have to buy gas on another day of the week.

America is a capitalist economy. The market and its many aspects determine the price of almost everything. If we will continue to buy it, they will continue to charge what the market will bear. The government may place controls on pricing through regulation, but that is pretty much a thing of the past..Well..Today's financial crisis brought on by gas prices and the housing and credit markets may alter that, but I digress. The other role the government plays in the price of gasoline is in gas taxes, imposed by states and varying from state to state, but the national average on gas is about 50 cents a gallon. Changing presidents will do nothing to the price of gas and removing the gas taxes won't help much either.

There is no supply problem in America right now. The problem is capacity and we don't have enough. There are tens of millions more cars using gas today than there were in the late 70s when the last refinery was built in America. The demand for industrial use of oil products has increased a hundredfold. OPEC could up its production 100% and it would make no difference at all. We would just have a bunch of oil sitting in storage. Granted, we would be getting it at today's price and not the speculated price down the road, but even still, it would make little difference.

Ah, speculation. That isn't the only problem in the soaring price of oil, but it is the largest part right now and it's not the oil industry doing the speculating. The vast majority of speculators around the world have no intention of ever taking delivery of one barrel of oil. If you are a law enforcement officer or a fireman, just to name a couple of pieces of the puzzle, you may be part of the problem. Many of the pension funds in these professions are heavily involved in oil speculation to shore up their funds in the future. I find it highly unlikely that anyone who discovers that their pension fund is heavy in the oil market is going to demand that it be stopped. It's not always the big, bad oil companies making waves, sometimes it's the people we admire, or at least their future benefactors. Most of these pension funds are set up by unions, who we all know are in bed with the liberals. So stop blaming republicans!

We need to become energy independent and as long as the environmentalist lobbies are in charge of America's energy policies, that is simply not going to happen. Those folks need to pull their heads out of the seventies and realize that technologies have advanced while they have been living in trees standing on corners with signs. Nuclear and clean coal power would cut the demand for petroleum products by huge numbers. New refineries would keep production flowing with no bottlenecks in the supply to public chain and investing in the exploration and recovery of our own vast oil resources would insure our supply for a hundred years as we invest in alternative and renewable energy sources to make the demand problem even less an issue.

No single alternative energy source is going to fix the problem. Hybrids are becoming more available in full sized cars, but they will never replace big rigs, trains, RV's or pickups pulling toy haulers. The horsepower just isn't there without internal combustion. Fuel Cell technology may someday make that jump, but it is a long way off, most likely not in my lifetime. We need oil and that will not change anytime soon. Neither will gas prices.

The price of oil at its base is a matter of how much it costs an oil company to reover and/or buy it and when we are stuck buying it from other countries we are at the mercy of those countries and the world oil speculation market. Were we energy independent, the speculation markets in other countries(Great Britain is a HUGE part of the problem HERE)would have very little, if any, effect on our oil prices. Don't believe me? Go look up the price of gas in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

Had we spent the eighties increasing our capacity and investing in our own resources, the price of gas would have stabilized way back then and OPEC could hold someone else hostage. We are the only country in the world with fossil fuel resources we are unwilling to tap. It is ridiculous. There are even people who are harping about renewable energy, but not in THEIR back yard! What a bunch of putzes so many Americans have become!

It appears that many Americans are finally waking up to the fact that the environmentalists are a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It stinks that it had to come to this to get them to see the light because it will take many years for any changes made today in our energy policies to have an effect at the pump, other than the price we pay OPEC may decrease as they panic in the face of our resolve.

Americans are not losers. Despite what so many would have us think, we are still the preeminent power and technological leaders in the world. I know many people who work abroad in various fields, and according to them, everyone still looks to America as a standard. We will drill in ANWR and off the coasts. Americans are not about to sit idly by while our economy collapses under the weight of political pandering and decisions made in foreign lands. History has proven that it generally takes a catastrophic event to wake us up, and the failure of thousands of trucking companies and dozens of airlines in the last six months is a pretty good indication of a catastrophic event.

America hasn't had a realistic energy policy since LBJ, but I have a feeling we are in for change alright, and it won't have anything to do with Barack Obama. It will be the American people who demand it, and that is just as it should be!