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The major oil companies all made less profit in 2009, but mostly because they could barely make a billion on refining and selling gasoline and diesel fuel, with demand running from down to stagnant. Yet they made plenty of billions on drilling and selling oil, which has more than doubled in price from around $30 a barrel (42 gallons) at the end of 2008 to around $75 a barrel on Monday. Yet global oil consumption was also down in 2009 from 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Does this make any sense at all?

 Why be obsessed with the price of gasoline? Easy. High energy prices, including prices at the pump, will slow and even reverse economic recovery. Every 10-cent a gallon increase in the price of a gallon of gas means another $1 billion  less for consumers to spend on anything else. Drivers are spending $50 a month more on gasoline than they were a year ago, when prices bottomed out.No wonder the oil industry wants climate change legislation to go away.

Supplies of oil and fuel in the U.S. are up, and so is the price of oil--it has surged to $82 dollar a barrel, pushing gasoline over $3.00 a gallon in California. Wait, isn't price supposed to go down as supplies rise? This kind of speculator-driven disconnection of energy prices from supply and demand trashed the economy in 2008, and regulators need to act before the usual spring spike in gasoline prices. The regulatory sheriffs might make the deadline, according to a Bloomberg report:

Carbon trading. Oh, yawn. Too weird and complicated. MEGO. Leave me alone. But wait a minute: A new website, Carbon Watch, could change your mind about keeping up with cap and trade. It's a joint project of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS's "Frontline," and aims to put the central battle on global warming in terms that engage all of us.

Why is it that media reports on oil company profits only compare them to the previous quarter and the previous year? This week's third-quarter profit reports for Exxon, Shell, Chevron and friends showed profits down by half or more from last year's pigs-at-the-trough delirium. Less than $5 billion for Exxon! Less than $4 billion for Chevron! They sound like the jobless should be giving part of their unemployment check to poor little Exxon. Let's get a grip on how much we don't want these profits to "recover" to what they were a year ago.

Oil prices hit another record for the year today, at over $78 dollars for each 42-gallon barrel in futures markets. That's well over double the late 2008 low of 32 dollars a barrel. Here are the reasons given in various news stories: Dropping dollar, threats to Nigerian oil fields, a jump in U.S. industrial production, a drop in U.S. gasoline stocks. If that sounds like deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would put it, you're right. And just like last year's pricing roller coaster, it doesn't add up.

Who knew that investment giant Goldman Sachs was in the oil business? I'm picturing top execs earning their tens-of-millions bonuses in hard hats and oil-streaked yellow overalls. The news is part of an otherwise depressing Wall Street Journal story on financial industry lobbying against regulations to cure the fever in energy markets that trashed the economy last year. But it's a Eureka! moment on loopholes.

If an oil giant finds a "giant" oil discovery, do oil prices respond with a sharp drop? Nope, because oil prices aren't following anything except the stock market. BP trumpeted a big find in the Gulf of Mexico this week, and oil markets responded by staying about as flat as the Dow...

Did you hear the one about how the Bush administration used the wrong calculations last year when it declared that it wasn't financial speculation causing the huge oil spike price?  It's one of many newsworthy punchlines of a strong new study that describes how government handed our energy markets over to corporate speculators, with economy-wrecking consequences--right up to destruction of the value of the dollar.

If a few slightly cheerful sentences from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke can spike the price of oil to a record for the year, the economy is in serious trouble. There's no real-world reason for a barrel of oil to cost $75, and every buck of increase in oil means renewed pain for consumers at the pump and businesses...