Okay help me out here. When the oil prices started spiking and oil company CEOs started being

[Justice wanted]

jerks didn't Clinton open up the reserves and forced the prices down?


Couldn't Obama do the same thing?

[gordianot]

1. From what I hear the problem is not oil production but the closing of refineries.

The old drill baby drill mantra ignores that the cost of oil is controlled by oil cartels supply and demand be dammed. Every puke that advocates increased oil production should be kicked in the ass which adds up to constant 100% Republican ass kicking. Unfortunately if Obama turned loose oil reserves it would just set there at the whim of oil refineries.

[Justice wanted]

2. ah thank you.

[Romulox]

5. What exemption from antitrust legislation do oil refiners have?

If two gas stations on the same block collude to control prices by $ .01, it is actionable, but if multinational corporations do it, and we are powerless? Hard to swallow.

[RC]

10. In Bismarck North Dakota, the price of gas goes up or down in unison

at every gas station within hours.

Except for those stations along the interstates, which have higher prices, the price is the same everywhere else in town. Bismarck also has the highest gas prices in the state.
There is a refinery across the river in Mandan ND where Bismarck get most, if not all of its gas. They reason given for the high prices? The headquarters for the refinery is in Minneapolis MN and so they can charge shipping from Minneapolis. Approximately 600 miles. The refinery itself is less than 5 miles from Bismarck.
I uses to live in Bismarck for 30 years and it was always thus.

[HereSince1628]

3. The problem isn't an immediate shortage

The push upwards isn't in supply, per se, but rather a willingness by speculators to pay more.

Understanding why the folks with the money would be telling the commodities traders to purchase at higher prices seems to be beyond the issue of the current supply, but it could be a number of things

On one end it's possible to blame fear of shortages, and consequently even much higher prices, in the near term due to military action with Iran, it's also possible that it includes other things.

In the middle there is the 'greed' of the cartels, who are glad to profit from the spike.

At the other, admittedly more tin-foil, end it also seems undeniable that the folks with the big money to speculate the price up include the very very rich. And some of the very rich are people like the Kochs, people who are willing to spend very large sums of money to take control of a government which doesn't like their pipe(line) dream. The public is convinced that Obama's electability depends upon continued recovery. Ending the recovery by crushing consumer spending through spiked price of a key commodity is certainly within the grasp of the power-mad plutocrats.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. Not a production problem and not a refinery problem either. The USA is currently

exporting more barrels of refined gas and diesel than ever before. It's a problem with speculators betting that things will 'heat up' even more in the Middle East and oil prices will rise above $130 a barrel. The other problem is with worldwide demand. Unless the US takes away all other countries' oil production via military force, we don't control prices. And we're now competing with other countries for that oil: see China.

[gordianot]

6. You are right about speculators however the refining formula has an impact.

Twenty miles down the interstate gas stations are allowed to get supplies from different sources. I have been watching this all fall and this winter. The price differential is as much as 30 cents per gallon. I know a few station managers who are up front why they have to charge more.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Not in my state. There's probably less than $.02 variance between several counties.

However, here's what the gasoline companies are doing:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/01/09/the-gasoline-export-scam/

"You don’t have to be a genius to know that gasoline costs around $3.50 per gallon in the US.

What most Americans don’t know is that the only thing keeping the price above $2.00 is the fact that our oil companies are exporting our gasoline at bargain basement prices to their own foreign subsidiaries subsidized by high American prices."

That whole article is an excellent read.

[NCTraveler]

8. Obama did make an attempt to do the same thing.

June 24, 2011

"President Obama yesterday approved a sale of 30 million barrels of crude oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as part of a joint effort with the International Energy Agency to flood global markets with 60 million barrels of petroleum over the next month."

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/06/24/24greenwire-white-house-defends-oil-reserve-sale-amid-whis-13681.html

[bhikkhu]

9. With the rest of the world also willing to pay that much as well...

The net effect might be to ship our strategic oil reserve overseas, and then have to buy it back from the Saudis at the same price again, for the sake of a few cents on the gallon at the pumps here.

Its a national strategic oil reserve, not an effective way to manipulate the world oil market.