With gas prices rising by the day, I think the $4/gallon day is becoming a reality. Motorists are not happy at all. So people start wondering what to do about it. After all, aren’t all these oil companies making record profits off this? If that’s true, then why not hit them right where it hurts. I found these two articles explaining why some of the tactics we think would work would not.

Oil Strikes and Gasoline Buyouts

A cap on the price of gasoline is a bad idea…

The problem is more complex than we’d like to think it is. It also doesn’t help that we don’t have enough oil refineries making gasoline. As this article points out, it doesn’t help when the price of crude oil keeps going up and consumer demand is plummeting.

At Valero, the nation’s largest independent refiner, first-quarter
profit melted by 76 percent. Its refining capacity allows it to process
heavier grades of crude oil that typically trade at a discount. Still,
its profit dropped to $261 million in the first quarter compared with
$1.1 billion last year.

Hard to justify building more refineries when it could be a money losing operation.