With the price of gasoline at the pump climbing to $4 a gallon and heating oil already over that, conspiracy theories over suspected reasons are everywhere about.
Understandable, but I don't buy them. Too much else going on.
Oil is not just big business, it's BIG business. It may be connected to the gas pump and the thermostat, but it's connected, foot, root, and jowl to just about everything we eat, touch, and breathe or power our combat vehicles with half the world away.
It wasn't always the case. Oil was discovered and put to some primitive use by American Indians around 1400 and something, but it wasn't until 1859 that Col. Edwin Drake drilled for it successfully in Titusville, Penn. Engineers finally figured out how to crack it into what we first put into our kerosene lamps, and later Henry Ford and others used to power the ancestors of our gas gobblers of today.
I was about 10 years old before I got to sit spellbound by a kitchen stove oil jug to marvel at the parade of bubbles rising up every time the jug glugged.
The first commercial use of gasoline in a vehicle I knew was in Mr. Lynch's Model T Ford Salada Tea panel truck parked across the street from my grandfather's house.
Range oil sold for 25 cents a jug at the corner grocery down the street, and we burned its two gallons in the evenings over three days before refill, it being during what became known as the Great Depression.
Twenty five cents worth of oil today would hardly get the basement furnace started.
That's because of supply and demand. It always is. There was little demand back then because of the depression. There's a lot of it today because there are a lot more of us in the market places here and around the world. Oil is not the only thing that connects us, but it's importance is central to everything from the environment to world peace.
When we face problems over which we have little control, the tendency is to take the nearest reason for their origin. Distrust of power being something essential to survival, the oil industry comes in for more brickbats than bouquets.
There are those refineries stinking up the environment. There are those oil barons stuffing their attic trunks with our hard-earned dollars. There are those politicians cozying up to whatever is needed to keep the money pumps pumping. Those kinds of thoughts fuel our distrust and nourish those seeking public office who use them to their advantage. Distrust is not irrelevant to reality, but it can be a sty in the eye of accepting evidence to the contrary of our beliefs.
Hard to take when facts don't match suspicions.
Well, fact is that gasoline demand is down, not up. Fact is the oil industry is making money from it. No surprise there because rising costs at the pump result in better planning by those who use our cars for travel, and no surprise that somewhere along the extended lines of the oil industry someone is benefitting more than usual. But if demand is down so is production, which means that plans for additional refineries are put on hold. That's a saving for the industry, but not consumers.
That's not supposition. That's the case, and it's not surprising. Reconfiguring a refinery, or building a new one, is not only a major investment. Considering all the environmental demands involved as well as the uncertainties of what's going on in the Middle East, it's a major risk.
This is a presidential election year in which just about anything and everything is up in the air. That puts a shine on a lot of considerations, but it fogs others. The war is one thing, but that's where a lot of oil is. Something to take the pump while refilling.
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Bill Plante of Newbury is a staff columnist.
