Oil

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler is investigating a Rockville gasoline distributor after prices at the pump jumped 25 cents overnight last week, he said Monday. The inquiry takes place as Senate Democrats prepare a vote on legislation that would curb federal tax subsidies to the largest oil companies. Gansler said Empire Petroleum Holdings, which serves gas stations in Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties, has cooperated with his investigation, which he said he launched in response to a consumer complaint.

Even the staunchest admirers of corporate CEOs — you know, the star-struck junior executives who buy the ghost-written biographies and how-to-manage books — will have to admit that there's something downright cathartic about seeing oil company executives grilled by a congressional committee when gasoline prices hit $4 per gallon. Try as they might to defend $35 billion in profits in the first quarter alone, the CEOs presented a thoroughly unconvincing case for why their industry should be subsidized through tax breaks.

Re your article "Demand, not speculation, cited for rising oil prices" (May 8), while demand is a factor in rising oil prices, multiple factors must be included to get the entire picture of why prices are rising. International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol must not be paying attention to current events; how can he not include the recent Libyan crisis and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami as factors in rising gas prices? "We have to learn to live with these higher prices," Mr. Birol said.

How come the gas prices went up every day for the past month and a half when the price per barrel of oil went up, but now the price of a barrel of oil dropped almost $15 and not one gas station has dropped their price per gallon. Someone needs to check on the oil companies and see why prices have not come down and what are the oil companies doing with all their profits. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If we had to pay when the price went up, we should get the benefit of lower prices when oil prices drop.

ExxonMobil Corp. lawyers presented their first witnesses Monday in Baltimore County Circuit Court, opening their defense in a lengthy jury trial after an underground gasoline leak in 2006 — one of the most serious in Maryland's history. Two witnesses — an ExxonMobil territory manager and the then-president of the Greater Jacksonville Association — gave their accounts of the day they learned of the leak of about 25,000 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline and the weeks after, as fear spread through the Jacksonville community of about 4,000 households in northern Baltimore County.

I agree with op-ed contributor Peter Morici that economic recovery will spur demand for gasoline and jet travel ("Obama's failed oil policy," April 26). However, his idea that the money Americans spend on higher gas and vehicle prices will stay home to create good jobs does not appear to be working out. BP, for example, has posted great earnings. Yet the average American finds climbing gas prices a major challenge that fuels popular demand to drill everywhere, regardless of the consequences for the environment.

Prices at the pump are rising, and Americans are none too happy about it. Small wonder that President Obama's approval ratings have fallen like a sack of hammers in recent weeks: Nothing annoys voters quite like a $75 fill-up at their local service station. But if paying $4-a-gallon for regular wasn't painful enough, filling station sticker shock has launched a deluge of nonsensical proposals to lower the price of gas. Perhaps the most dishonest of these is a renewed call for domestic oil drilling.

Friday marks the 41 s t anniversary of Earth Day and provides the customary opportunity to take stock of the environmental movement in this country. Unfortunately, for all the talk of the greening of America, it's been a pretty rotten 12 months for the planet and its defenders. Just look at the bookend events: A year ago this week, the Gulf of Mexico suffered the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Whatever the lessons learned from that trauma, it hasn't resulted in big changes to the country's oil-dependent energy strategies.

President Barack Obama's speech Tuesday night about the military action in Libya was composed of 3,362 words. But there were two words conspicuously absent from the 30-minute address: "Oil" and "energy. " Back in the day, when politicians didn't use word like "interest" -- a word that appeared six times in Obama's speech -- as a euphemism, they spoke more plainly.  A quick history lesson (I know, I know, but I promise I'll keep this short): When Europeans were divvying up the deceased Ottoman Empire after World War I, they spoke openly of the desire to control oil fields as their reason for interest in African and Middle Eastern countries.

While the news media concentrates on Japan's nuclear problems, we in the United States face a devastating financial "tsunami" of our own. We are currently looking at unbridled government deficits of at least $1 trillion per year as Congress haggles over extending the debt limit — now at about $14 trillion — and offers minuscule cost reductions. As we engage in military action in Libya, we cannot continue to add hundreds of billions of dollars per year to the deficit in unending Middle East wars.