The response to slumping gasoline use would likely mean higher prices for drivers. Judy Dugan, research director for the Santa Monica-based advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, said that "closing or selling refineries to others who would limit production would be a serious case of corporate irresponsibility."

Interesting that it took a New York newspaper to tell Californians that a couple of giant Texas oil refining companies are bankrolling a ballot initiative to kill the state's popular climate change/green energy law. The whole saga is much like Oklahoma oilman T. Boone Pickens' failed effort in 2008 to make California taxpayers subsidize his natural gas business. Except that Pickens was honest about paying for his own ballot initiative.

 

While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil interests, large agribusiness and... senior citizens? Yes, the first member group that pops up on the website of Energy Citizens, an organization solely aimed at killing climate legislation, is a group called "The 60-Plus Association." It's a name that sticks in memory, because it's all over the member lists of anti-reform groups in the health care battle, sort of the anti-AARP. And I've run into them before.

 

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.