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When a private club that is too cozy with corporations make the rules on consumer protection, guess what happens? The National Conference on Weights and Measures met last week voted to just dump years' worth of proposals and plans to fix the "hot fuel" ripoff.  It reminded me of the old Soviet trick of removing purged bureaucrats from ceremonial photos.

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:

If you had to choose between oil and water, one or the other, which would you choose? Living without oil or natural gas wouldn't be fun, but you wouldn't live at all without drinkable water. Which raises another question: Why is Exxon's huge bet on natural gas drilling that may widely contaminate U.S. drinking water being so widely praised, with so little examination? It's a combination of media that tend to lump all natural gas together, and gigantic regulatory loopholes that protect Exxon and other shale-gas drillers from even telling us what they're putting into our water.

It's a cheap shot, but I'm never above making the oil lobby look phony and stupid. Thanks to TPM for posting a photo from an American Petroleum Institute pamphlet that appears to show a (slightly) racially diverse group of industry employees. Except... 1. It's a stock photo of some random group. 2. The race of two figures was changed, one from white to black, the other from white to Asian. 3. Both are really the same man.

On the other fossil fuel front, Sen. Robert Byrd, the coal industry's best ally in Washington for decades, is standing up against its current scare campaign in West Virginia, and its demand to continue "mountaintop removal" mining. The EPA has held up new permits for this destructive and polluting form of coal extraction, and coal companies are telling West Virginians that they'll all lose their jobs.

California doesn't have much going for it lately, with a new $21 billion hole in its budget, more than 12% unemployment and a hapless state Legislature. But it provided cause for cheer today with its own climate regulation proposal. Because the underlying legislation (small PDF) is already in place the state is way ahead of Washington. It may be ahead of Washington on long-term economic health as well, just by signaling a stable future for green tech.

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.