Sorry for the outburst.

 

I would like to remind you what caused this prices to go higher and why they got a profit. It was a dramatic increase in demand in a short amount of time, oil rigs being shut down in the Gulf Coast (drop in supply), and the natural rule of rationing in a free market economy. When the Hurricanes came, people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas had to rush to fill up their tanks to evacuate. The gas stations have a limited supply and raised their prices to help ration the gas supply because some people as a result would not fill up with quite as much because of the high prices. People in other states filled up because they were afraid of not having enough gas. Raising prices like that is rationing in free market economy. The supply was cut because people in refineries and oil rigs out in the ocean had to evacuate the rigs and that supply was cut. This of course raises the prices as well. That is why they made record profits. If you present them with the chance to get the oil, they will go for it. They are not a cartel with each other because one will go after it to make a higher profit, and the others will go for it even if you were correct. What do you propose to do to punish the companies for "profiteering?"

Let me tell you about anyother record profit that happened in the past. Battery manufactures were having record profits during late 1999 because of the Y2K scare. Prices went up then as well because the demand went through the roof because people thought we weren't going to have electricity. Situations like this happen when a perceived crisis or when expecting a crisis.

What do you think the increase in Ethanol factories in this country that will happen in a few years are representing? The Government IS pushing Ethanol. Many Senators and Congressmen in the midwest are pushing for Ethanol. Your going to have your politicians who are in bed with oil, your politicians in bed with Ethanol, your politicians in bed with environmentalists. Big Deal! It happens all the time and there is nothing we can really do about it except for run for office, but in order to run successfully for office, we need campaign funds and donations to counter act their donations. The system is not perfect and no other system is perfect, just accept it.

Now as making vehicles run on Ethanol, your right it is basically just a few changes in the computer and fuel lines from what I understand, but the problem is Ethanol right now is not cost effective. On these FFV cars, it costs more money to run on E-85 than it does to run on gasoline, because Ethanol gets around 2/3s the fuel economy. It is going to hurt people more in the long run to run it on that level. The only way to correct this is to increase the compression ratio to around 12-14 to 1 to make up the difference. Have the government cover the expense of making this change? That would be very, very, very expensive and with the way Government spends money these days, it might be more cost effective just to buy everyone a brand new loaded FFV car than to do that. How do you propose we get people to change over to FFV vehicles? And how do we supply enough raw materials to produce the ethanol? We use vegetables to do this that we use as exports. Food is one of our exports.