Who's to blame for high gas prices?

"Gas prices are at record highs again. Many think oil companies are to blame. In fact, a May 2004 poll showed that 77 percent of Californians believed this to be true. However, this just shows the media have failed to properly inform people about who's causing high gas prices. One thing is certain: oil companies are not to blame for high gas prices. These companies are responsible for producing the gasoline we need. In California, where gas prices are among the nation's highest, the oil industry has been repeatedly investigated to find evidence of "price manipulation" and none has ever been found.

Although there are other causes of high gas prices, such as high gasoline taxes, the primary cause is environmental regulation. For example, environmental regulation has significantly restricted drilling for oil in Alaska and on the continental shelf. More drilling will increase the gasoline supply (up to 10 percent from greater Alaskan drilling alone) and thus lower prices.

Further, there are currently 18 different gasoline formulations in use across the United States, making it much more costly to produce and distribute gasoline. These blends aren't needed due to requirements of automobile engines, nor are they required by oil companies. The blends, including different ones used at different times of the year and in different geographic areas, are forced on Americans by environmental regulations. Among other things, the regulations force refiners to incur greater costs in switching from the production of one blend to another. They also force refiners to produce a more costly "summer blend," which is partially responsible for the current rise in price.

The situation is worst in California, where environmental regulations are strictest. For example, California was one of only three states to require the removal of the octane booster MTBE in January 2004. This reduced the gasoline supply by almost 10 percent...... It's no accident that gas in California is generally 30 to 40 cents above the national average.

From drilling to refining to distribution, environmentalists have done everything they can to raise the price of gasoline. The above raises a question: Why do environmental regulations exist?

One might think they exist to protect consumers, but the evidence doesn't show this. For instance, MTBE was banned based on claims that it causes cancer. However, it has never been shown to be a danger to humans in the amounts to which they might be exposed. Claims that it "causes cancer" are based on experiments in which mice were fed doses almost 70,000 times larger than to what humans might be exposed. No scientist worthy of the title would make claims based on that kind of extrapolation.

Environmentalists are not actually concerned with the well-being of man. Their real motive is to sacrifice man to nature by stopping industrial activity. This is what they explicitly state. For instance, Adam Kolton of the Alaska Wilderness League states, "Drilling the wildest place in America is objectionable no matter how it's packaged." David M. Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, states, "We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have ... more value - to me - than another human body, or a billion of them." "

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THE HORMONE SCARE

In her new book The Truth about Hormones, published this week, Parry seeks to provide some 'perspective and sanity' on the discussion about hormones. We know that both natural and manmade chemicals with hormone-like actions are ubiquitous. They are in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat and 'in the very fabric of our daily lives, in cosmetics, plastics and household chemicals'. These endocrine disruptors - or 'gender benders' as they are commonly called - can block or disrupt the actions of human hormones.

This may sound scary, but as Parry tells me, 'every mouthful of food that we have has some "endocrine disrupting" activity - without harm. Our bodies are evolved to have a large amount of "endocrine disruption" going on'. She explains that plant foods contain at least 12,000 chemicals - produced for structural, attractant, chemoprotective and hormonal purposes. Cabbage contains 49 natural pesticides. Although eating cabbage may inhibit the action of oestrogen, Parry says 'such food has been part of the human diet for centuries and common sense suggests that we need not fear them'.

Some chemicals with oestrogen activity, such as phthalates, were banned in Europe in 2004. However this chemical is 'five orders of magnitude [100,000] times less potent than the oestrogen in your own body, and a hundredfold less potent than the phytoestrogens found in food which you eat all the time'. Parry says: 'We worry about the tiniest levels of hormones, believing they may cause major threat - when we have got walloping levels of hormones onboard internally. It doesn't make sense.'

She finds it rather curious that some natural hormone disruptors are viewed as good while synthetic chemical disruptors are viewed as bad - especially given that 'the [scientific] work that has been done shows that natural and synthetic chemicals turn on exactly the same genes'.

Synthetic chemicals are blamed for everything from the falling age of puberty and declining sperm counts to increasing rates of testicular and breast cancers. But take the age of puberty: falling from around 17 years of age in the mid-nineteenth century to around 11 years of age today. This may seem 'unnatural' to us - that 11-year-old girls are developing breasts, for instance. But as Parry says, 'part of the reason for this is simply that we are better fed and are healthier. It is curious thing, isn't it? People want to say that chemicals are all terrible and horrible, and we are all going to hell in a handcart, but at the same time we are living longer than ever before - which is kind of an inconvenient fact.'.....

And surely there cannot be a biological explanation for the expansion of adolescence in Western societies? Parry recognises this. 'My parents' generation was pretty much out of the nest and working at 16', she says. 'If I get mine out of the nest [she has two adolescent boys] by 25 I'll be lucky - and that's probably how most parents feel. That's partly because of a cultural shift. We want them to stay in education longer - recognising they need this period of adjustment and experimentation at being an adult.'

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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