"White House press secretary Jen Psaki used a contentious question-and-answer session with a Fox News correspondent to refute a string of right-wing media tropes Republicans have used to blame President Joe Biden’s energy policies for recent high gas prices."
The oil and gas industry will post record profits, like most industries at the moment. Companies are realizing that people here are divided and brainwashed enough to be taken advantage of to new, unheard of extremes.
They know people are gonna blame the president cause most Americans are too lazy to do their homework and see why gas prices are actually rising. Right now it’s all corporate profiteering. We haven’t stopped importing Russian oil and the gas your paying for today was usually bought a few weeks or months ago. The higher bent crude prices aren’t affecting the cost of gasoline being bought now but the cost of making it now. Companies are betting on it getting more expensive so they’re raising prices at the pump. This is really how inflation works; it’s not that it cost more so you raise prices, it’s that you expect it to cost more so you raise prices. Inflation is proactive not reactionary.
The gas shit drives me nuts. If there is a small ripple in the market executives say " we have to raise prices because it will cost more to buy in the future, it doesn't matter that we have tons of supply that we bought cheap." Then after a spike and the markets dropping like crazy its " we paid a lot for this so we still need to charge more because it cost more." consumers never get a break its just a continued extraction of money so they(big oil) can make record profits.
Much of the price increase is due to supply and demand. Pandemic hits: Demand drops, Price drops, production drops. Pandemic restrictions dropping: Demand increase, price increases, production still lagging behind.
Startup and building the labor force back up are probably the big hurdles to getting production back up to speed. Keep in mind that last hurricane season walloped quite a few plants too so there is that to contend with as well.
It would be great if they could just produce 10x what we need and hold it in storage but gas has a shelf life (about 3 months on average) not to mention the hazards of storing that much fuel.
It’s a free market. Oil and Gas companies ramp up domestic production when the economics make sense as the price goes up. And even then they can still sell it to whomever they want. There is no gaurantee the oil goes into the domestic market. That goes on for too long and Opec opens the tap, kills the price, and tanks the industry again. wash, rinse, repeat.
Blaming the government and the president is pretending we have a nationalized system. Is that what they want? Pretty UnAmerican.
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