I've got gas...

I find myself rather viciously torn watching people tearing their hair out at the gas pumps.
On the one hand, I think gas prices are only just starting to become realistic. It was known and understood nearly four decades ago that oil reserves are not infinite. It should also have been obvious at that time if not earlier that China and India would not remain backwaters (albeit very populous backwaters) forever.
Robert Heinlein, in his 1980 work EXPANDED UNIVERSE, said that "oil is far too valuable to waste on personal transportation". At that time, he urged we begin work to take advantage of unlimited solar power available in orbit...R and D required on existing (1980) technology only. But "in orbit" means "space", and the American people have by and large decided there's nothing in space worth wasting time and money over. Of all the shortsighted mistakes America has made, that one may actually turn out to be the most costly.
Meanwhile, the world's depleting oil at a phenomenal rate. It's so hard to get reliable data that I figure there just has to be a conspiracy afoot, but one source suggests that for every barrel of oil we discover, we're using nine. That can't be good.

Doubtless you've noticed the price hikes at your local grocer, particularly on bread, rice, and flour. There is a remarkably well-entrenched attitude, world news be damned, that supermarkets are gouging their customers. Gouging is of course in the eye of the beholder with the shopping cart, but I can assure you there are very few things on which any grocery store is making a substantial profit. In my dairy aisle, I can count those things on the fingers of one thumb. When it comes to specials, it's not uncommon to see stores losing 30, 40, or even 50 points on a hot sale item.
(The same holds true at 7-Eleven, incidentally. Yes, the prices for, say, a frozen pizza at 7-Eleven boggle the mind: they're easily 35% higher than the grocery store across the parking lot charges for the exact same frozen pizza. If only you could see that it costs 7-Eleven 35% more to stock that frozen pizza, you'd understand. There's a reason we get convenience store operators in droves, trying to cherry-pick carts full of whatever's on special this week: our sale retail is significantly lower than their cost.)
Anyway, the cost of things like flour, rice, and corn has skyrocketed over the past fourteen months, by up to 128%. With grocery margins as razor-thin as they are, it's simply unrealistic not to expect retails to keep pace.
Why are commodity prices soaring? Partly biofuels--and there's a perfect example of what the military would deem a Charlie Fox situation. What brainiac came up with the idea of diverting food from hungry people so he could--priorities, people!--fuel his car? More importantly, what gang of brainiacs listened to this moroon and said "hyuck, hyuck, hyuck, now that thar's a good idear?"
And yet...and yet...farmers are actually being paid something approaching a living wage for the first time in a great many years. Can't blame them for saying "it's about time".
Why is it that no matter what, we've set it up so there must be winners and there must be losers? Am I some kind of pinko commie for suggesting that we should be working to minimize the number of losers in any given situation?

And while we're at it, maybe making sure the winners aren't winning quite so goddamn much?

Have you seen the profits from our oil companies lately? Exxon just came out with the highest profit ever posted by any company in history. The Canadian firms are raking it in hand over fist. I'm having an awful lot of trouble squaring these immense profits with what we're told is the increasing difficulty in getting oil out of the ground. From this end--the bent-over end with the gas pump jammed up its butt--it feels very much like gouging. Ripping, tearing, gouging...I'm surprised there's no blood in my underwear.

But then again, I don't understand anything about fuel prices.
My father lives in the little hamlet of Britt, Ontario. Just down the road from him is your typical general store that stocks a little of everything. A gas pump sits outside this place, midway between the road and the river that parallels the road along its entire length...fill up your car, fill up your boat, no problem. Here's the thing: the price they charge you for gas is based exclusively on the price they were charged for their last shipment. There are times they're the lowest price for miles and miles around, and there are times their price is higher than anyone else's. But the point is these people operate on a typical retail model in an industry that seems to write its own rules when it comes to retail. Gas prices go up and down with no rhyme or reason, and what really irks me is it's actually starting to get predictable. I don't mean "oh, it's payday, prices will go up ten cents a litre today"...that's old hat. I mean Liberal MP Dan McTeague on my radio yesterday morning letting me know gas prices will fall three cents a litre overnight. Sure enough, they did. How the hell does he know this ahead of time?

I wouldn't have such a problem paying for gas, even at twice the price it is now, if a couple of basic conditions were in place:

1) Money from gas funded public transit. I don't mean some piddly-assed fraction of a percentage of tax, either. I want to see billions invested in making public transit a viable option for Canadians, and while we're at it, let's make it free to riders. Denmark's considering making public transport free throughout the country; to my mind, anything Denmark considers is at least worth considering here. Would you ride the bus if it were free? Isn't public transport something we're trying to encourage?
Researching this, I find every city in North America that's experimented with free transit has had an instant hooligan problem. Hmmm. Can we throw these people off a moving bus? Maybe not, but there has to be some other solution.
2) Oil companies were required by law to invest a sizeable percentage of their whopping profits into renewable technologies. I don't share Jim Kunstler's view that cars are doomed, only that we need to be working much harder to make every drop of gasoline count en route to eliminating gas entirely.

In the meantime, some explanation for why the price of gas fluctuates as it does would be more than welcome.