way2roll wrote:

People believe what they want to believe and there are plenty of media on either side of the aisle to feed constituents' hungry agendas. Facts are slippery things and often it's hard to even tell what the facts are when biased news outlets literally tell absolute lies on a daily basis.

But Oil is a commodity traded just like orange juice. It's subject to supply, demand and speculation. During covid, oil companies were actually losing money. There was no demand because no one went anywhere - for a long time. Post covid demand went from nothing to everything in a shorter span than oil companies could react to ramp up production. Neverminded the hesitancy to over produce if demand suddenly dropped off again which would result in another negative return. And then Russia - one of the largest oil producing nations in the world - attacked Ukraine. That's a big of an impact on speculation and a scramble for reactivity as one can imagine. The entire world is in a state of runaway inflation and oil is expensive literally everywhere on the planet. Many countries are paying much more than the US at the pump. Sure there's politics at play, but nothing on the order of a global pandemic and one of the number one suppliers at war and under extreme sanctions. Believe what you want, but no one person is responsible for gas prices. But everyone likes to blame someone and it's usually a person they already don't like.

HappyKayakers wrote:

Amazing how some people have to go political when politics has nothing to do with the price of fuel today.