What can be done about it?
There's no chance that oil companies will act in any honorable way on their own.
(Please, God, no Congressional investigations! -there's no bigger rat-hole!)
Tax them; and collect it. That's all I can come up with...

Where they did that in 1938.

~80 cents a quart/liter here, so $3.20/gal.

in los angeles.

This promise of lowering prices if we just drill more is nothing but a carrot that the oil companies dangle in front of our faces all the time.

new auto sales skyrocketing.

Piss on those that can't afford a new vehicle and have to drive a vehicle that only gets 18mpg, indeed.

Regulate, tax, take away their subsidies. They've abused the privilege of extracting finite resources.

Without heating oil, I would freeze to death. Long before that my plumbing would freeze. So I would likely be taking my morning constitutional in the back yard.

I cannot afford a delivery from my local supplier since their minimum delivery is 150 gallons. They have cheaper prices, but sending a truck out for delivery has its costs. I could pay them to deliver 50 gallons but the delivery charge would be more expensive than driving to the local country store six miles away and filling up a five gallon can and pouring it into my tank.

I've done this daily for a week and my SocSec doesn't come in until next Wed. Then, I will get the 150 gallons. But, until then, I will hand pump and pour five gallons a day. At least I will have money to pay for gasoline, food, and maybe a couple of beers.

Being poor sucks. But My quality of life is pretty damned good. I don't have cable TV or broadband Internet here in the National Forest in Michigan. But I do have 4G and my DU friends.

One thing that brings me back here is that one always has friends here, no matter how many troll here.

Thanks to you guys. You help me get through tough times.

the oil corporations two billion dollars a year in tax give aways on top of the billions a year they are making.

going rate is somewhere between $4.20 and $4.50. The oil companies are mobsters engaged in a mass shakedown.

Paid almost $6 per near Bishop, CA.

The speculators deliberately drive up the price because they legalized not having to take delivery of the stuff they bid on.

We who exist in Kalifornia really get beat ,feels like a test market to test how high they can go without strikes and or riots .
The worker bees who drive trucks get the worst of it because the nature of work vehicles demand more fuel =less m.p.g. with any fuel .

THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND:

"We have all the supply so we can demand whatever the fuck we want.'

$4.24 last week at some stations in San Francisco. It has always been that way. There is no legitmate reason for this. There are oil refinaries in the area....Oil tankers come in and out of the SF Bay day and night. But I have a theory: they punish us for our politics. We SF liberals are no friends of big corporations, enviormentally conscious, and we vote accordingly. I think we are forced to pay the price at the pump.
...just a theory.......

... you guys probably have a lot fewer SUVs and monster trucks on the roads imperiling your safety and poisoning your lungs with their emissions. I'd pay extra for gas to have that where I live.

Greed is the root of all evil. The top 1% obviously own all the rigs/production in the US. I would suspect they are also Republicans. This has the smell of "me me me me me" written all over it!!!!

Or was that a load of BS too?

Its a worldwide supply and demand market. China and India are more than making up the difference for us scaling back consumption. It's what the dumb shit Teabaggers just were not grasping with their stupid "drill baby, drill" chants. Go ahead and drill till your heart's content, and it all goes into the world's energy market. It was never meant to drill here, drill now for OUR sake. But the idiots thought so.

The only reason is sheer, unadulterated greed, aided and abetted by oil welfare.

Oil is a finite resource. and the easy to get to stuff was burned through years ago. The rate of current use requires that all sorts of expensive to find and extract oil be utilized.

Demand is up, in spite of rising prices everywhere:

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUVPGmOf6jslDEAn8TBMByEqdn3OrF0idYbdwgXk6GJlH7rKQ51A

Production costs to meet demand are up:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FeyfD5e2XDc/SwqPfjj1LYI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ZJQteL5O-8k/s1600/Graph+-+Marginal+cost+of+Oil+production+ass+a+function+of+source+and+production+rate.png

There is no cheap oil to fall back on, and the stuff we are burning through now costs a fortune to produce. Read what the cost of a barrel has to be to make the tar sands economical!

The future is more expensive, whoever you want to blame

it is no wonder.

U.S. oil output rose 14 percent to 6.5 million barrels per day last year - a record increase.

And we still import 2/3rds of our 'fix'.

By 2020, the nation is forecast to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's largest crude oil producer.

And if no more bills show up through 2020, I will be a millionaire.

And, according to one fundie minister, if you don't guzzle oil, God cries.

I guess they need more money so they can by more politicians. We need to stop corporate welfare.

We're all now competing for a dwindling supply of crude oil. That, and there's a fair amount of speculation in the oil futures markets that drive up prices. Also, OPEC can and will artificially restrict the supply of crude oil to keep prices high.

As a source of fuel, crude oil has more political and geopolitical baggage than any other source of fuel. It is a costly headache, and sadly, our infrastructure is still built around the assumption that crude oil will forever remain cheap. Urban sprawl was only ever supported by exceedingly cheap fuel, but those decades ended a good bit ago.

anybody here take econ in college? As more countries become developed, and more people are driving why would you expect the price of oil to decrease?

What did you learn in econ 101 when demand increases and supply increases?? Hey, the price remains the same. Oil production has consistently kept up with world demand. There has not been a significant disruption in world oil supply since 1979. In fact, if you look at some of the recent data you will see prices continue to increase even though overall demand has decreased.

Laws passed under 1st Bush and then Clinton deregulated the commodities markets including energy trading. The oil that ultimately ends up in your tank may have been traded 20+ times by huge institutional investors before the refinery bought it. The prices of oil have done nothing but spiral up. Now my compact car cost me as much to fill up as my full size pickup did several years ago.

The bank crisis in Cyprus will wind up having an effect on oil prices and it has nothing to do with supply and demand.

Sounds like your econ class was many decades ago, because supply and demand does NOT apply to oil. First of all, the price of oil is affected by speculation and commodities trading on Wall Street. In 2008, demand dropped and global supply was up, and prices increased by 25%. READ this and LEARN something:

http://useconomy.about.com/od/commoditiesmarketfaq/p/high_oil_prices.htm