What is up (no pun intended) with the gas prices?
There is no one single “real reason”. The failure of an oil refinery does drive up gas prices. There’s a very high demand for gasoline; a recent newspaper report said that people wouldn’t change their driving habits until gas was well over $4. Refinery problems decrease supply; demand remains the same; prices go up. That’s not all that’s going on. Instability in the Middle East means that oil could be cut off at any point. That makes the oil that we already have more valuable, against that possibility, which means more expensive. Oil is also getting harder to find. We’ve used up all of the easy-to-get oil, and now we have to look harder and drill deeper wells. Increased sophistication means we’re finding more and more oil, but we’re spending much more money to do it. All of that raises prices. There’s also an ugly feedback loop here. When the prices go up, s
