Meet the Man on a Mission to Expose Sneaky Price Increases on Gas in the U.S. and How He’s Been Targeted by Corporate America
It’s been about eight years since I began blogging about how natural gas prices have skyrocketed. A gas bubble that was predicted by the Energy Information Administration.
In the eight years since then, despite record low prices and record high levels of U.S. production, the gas industry has been forced to dramatically lower its prices, yet I can still find a price on the web that’s above last November’s record. (Note: Gasoline prices have dropped another 20% since November. We can all thank President Obama for that.) So where’s the problem, you might wonder?
Well, there’s no problem if you’re a big, powerful multinational corporation. If you have the resources (and the political clout) that ExxonMobil and other Big Oil companies do, you can make all the deals you want without any of the transparency you’d expect of the state oil companies. These are the same Big Oil companies that were the ones that wrote the Clean Air Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and everything else.
Big Oil has managed to have the law on its side (unlike its competitors) in the area of regulating pollution and controlling the market, and to get some of that money it wants through the use of lobbyists. Of course, it’s in these areas and their regulatory jurisdiction that they’ve been able to get lower prices on gas. When Chevron was buying oil from Russia in the late ’90s, for example, it would have been illegal (and costly) for Chevron to demand lower prices for its oil from Russia than the much higher prices it was able to charge from U.S. producers.
With the exception of a few U.S. states, Big Oil is able to charge whatever it
