Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Are You Getting Gouged at the Pump??
My brother writes: I thought you might be interested in seeing this. I don’t know why we haven’t seen a simple comparison like this in the news yet. This is a chart I put together using information from the U.S. Energy Information Agency website and a National Geographic article from last summer. It basically compares crude oil import prices to retail gas prices minus a fixed cost of $0.82/gallon for taxes, refining and transportation. You can see how they track each other pretty well until hurricane Katrina, when retail costs shot up much faster and higher than crude oil prices. This may be a little exaggerated since it doesn’t account for increased refining costs over time and by damage caused by the hurricane.
