$72.25--Here come the senators!

A new record for oil futures at NYMEX. ($73.46 in London.) Of course, senators are already grandstanding about rising gas prices, ready to jump right in and hold meaningless hearings like they did last year. They've sat in silence for decades while oil companies merged and merged again, instead of insisting that anti-trust laws be enforced to prevent monstrosities like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco and BP-Amoco from ever having the opportunity to fix prices. They've let CAFE standards slide, failed to fund alternative energy and especially conservation research, and allowed the worst president in world history to start war after war, threatening to shut off the flow of oil from the part of the world that has most of it.

It sounds like Chuck Schumer's ploy to get a photo-op has backfired. I googled and found several news reports covering this:

The New York Democrat, at a news conference in front of a Hess station in Manhattan, suggested that companies are deliberately under-producing, CNNMoney.com reported.

'The bottom line is they are producing at 85 percent capacity when they should be producing over 90 percent,' Schumer said. 'Are they scaling back production? Only by subpoenaing the companies and looking in their books will we get that answer.'

But none of the articles had a photo attached. Nice try, Chuck.

I don't want those oil execs to get any more billions either. But the problem isn't underproduction. It's overconsumption. Having the oil companies produce full-out only makes global warming worse and delays further the day when Americans finally catch on that we've got a very serious problem.