rising crude oil prices, low fuel inventories, strong summer driving season demand and an environmentally driven transition to new gasoline specifications are combining to keep upward pressure on pump prices.
When you adjust it for inflation, a year ago we were looking at gasoline prices that were cheaper than they had been during the Great Depression. So it was an extraordinary bargain.
In real terms, consumers today are paying considerably less for gasoline than they did during World War I.
All the tensions and stress in the world's oil markets are flowing into the gasoline pump. The crude oil market is very tight, and a market that's this tight is vulnerable to politics, to hurricanes, to strikes and to emotions, and that's what we're seeing.
Within four or five years the US might be getting 10 percent of its gasoline from ethanol - that would be like creating a new Indonesia.