With the recent hikes of gas prices, you’ve probably heard, the news is citing “Supply and Demand!” as the main reason. What the fuck? I’ve never been an economics major, but I don’t really believe that for one moment supply and demand is the case.

As far as I am aware (feel free to poke holes in this, itÂ’s an opinion based on barely any facts and IÂ’m not going to debate what I say here) our buddies OPEC have been pumping out oil at normal rates. If they had slowed down for some reason, I would think that this would have made news some months ago. Why months? Well, I highly doubt the gas IÂ’m burning today was pumped out of a well yesterday. Yes, it takes time to pump, transport and refine oil. Thus, there is usually an active supply in the lines, billions of gallons sitting around waiting in queue for its lifespan to burn away. Should that supply become low, it would have become news, and/or OPEC wouldÂ’ve started pumping more to refill the queue of fuels.

The same goes for refineries. Although IÂ’ll give a few of them the benefit of doubt that downtime during the recent outage of power that their supply had indeed dropped some. (ItÂ’s hard to believe that an oil refinery wouldnÂ’t have some gas powered generators, no?) And yes, for a short period of 2 or 3 days up here the demand was higher than usual, but again the refineries would have, should have been able to make up for that spike without hurting us, the poor defenceless gas guzzler.

What about the fact that the news is spewing “gas prices have risen 10-15 cents in the last 2 weeks!” How about 20 to 25 cents in the past 4? This hike isn’t new; it’s been on going since mid-end July. I bought gas for 64.7/liter on July 14, 69.9/liter on July 28 (I just thought that was a long weekend price gouge! Boy was I wrong) August 11 for 72.1/liter (before the outage) and just last week August 22 for 74.9/liter. So, say this, it sure wasn’t the power outage that caused this hike. And now, now it’s at 83.2 in some spots, and 91.1 in Vancouver! Holy flapjacks batman!

Needless to say I donÂ’t really think that supply nor is demand the issue. I donÂ’t buy it for an instant. ItÂ’s a controlled supply, and a fairly steady demand (although slowly on the rise, but that can easily be countered by a supply to match it!) ThereÂ’s just no reason, no reason at all.

Another thing, I don’t think the rules of supply and demand apply to gas. Unfortunately gas is a necessity for the majority of us. We all rely on gas powered cars, or other forms of gas powered vehicles to get to work. I could still get to work without gas, but I wouldn’t have much work to do after the trucks run out. Quite frankly we’ll buy gas regardless of the price. That’s the sad thing. We’ll buy it, complain and do it again. We can’t just say “fuck you” and go buy some other product. It’s not like buying a jug of milk for $1 when the demand exceeds the total output per cow the price gets hiked to $3 to slow the demand we can all move on to something else. That is where supply and demand works. Gas, no. I won’t accept it as an excuse. Although, I do see the price gouging as another reason to seek out and use our alternatives. They exist, even just the taking of half-steps away from the mega powers that screw us every day.