Oil & Gas Prices

After spending much of the spring and summer hyping the dire consequences of rising gas prices, CBS on Thursday night decided the plummeting cost of gas at the pump is really bad news. Noting that “crude settled at about $58 a barrel today, that's about $90 less than it was in July,” fill-in CBS Evening News anchor Harry Smith warned “that comes as a mixed blessing.” Reporter Mark Strassmann…

Earlier today, in a story on falling oil prices, Mark Williams of the Associated Press bemoaned "evaporating" consumption, warned that the abrupt prices drop would cause a decline in exploration, and cited the need for trillions of dollars of investment to find more fossil fuels.Contrary to or not in what Williams wrote: Consumption has barely fallen.The American electorate has chosen a new…

It's not like Barack Obama is a socialist or anything. It's just that Thomas Friedman wants him to put a "government master" in charge of the country's biggest manufacturing sector. Friedman made his modest proposal in his New York Times column of today, and expanded on it during a Morning Joe appearance. [H/t reader Tom.]Video also available here.I've got three easy reasons why Friedman's idea…

Californians by very wide margins defeated two green initiatives that anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts in the media and in legislative houses across the fruited plain should take heed...but will they?To begin with, Proposition 7 would have required utilities to generate 40 percent of their power from renewable energy by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025.Proposition 10 would have created $5…

Washington Post reporter Sholnn Freeman frontloaded his October 31 business section front page article, "Airfare Surcharges Stay Despite Oil Price Drop," not on examining the valid business reasons for why some airlines retain the fee but in citing a liberal politician seeking to grandstand the issue.:When oil prices were rising rapidly, many financially-strapped airlines started adding special…

CBS's "The Early Show" got an early start on the grumbling Oct. 30.CBSNews.com and "Early Show" co-host Julie Chen warned viewers about flying the "pricey skies" this "hardly festive" holiday season because airfares have gone "way up." Chen said fares were "absolutely going through the roof." Chen served up the numbers: I want to put up two graphics that show how much prices have increased…

Prices shouldn't be set by supply and demand.  They should be determined by, well, what prices "should" be.  That's the innovative theory Maggie Rodriguez propounded on today's Early Show.The Early Show anchor's unique take on economics came in the course of a segment on the falling price of gasoline.  Rodriguez lamented to co-anchor Chris Wragge that grocery prices weren't falling along with gas…

Matt Drudge learned long ago that jumping across the pond in the late evening and perusing the British press is a way to get a head start on the news, and in some cases to get news that the American press is ignoring. The situation with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is an example of the latter. If it happens, call it The Caracas Crackup -- The UK Telegraph is reporting that the inevitable…

There has been an unreality in the reports on the falling stock markets for at least the past 10 days. Each day's plunge seems to have been exclusively due to the "global economic crisis" and/or the supposed "freeze on credit." Oddly enough, the admittedly small bank where I have my business accounts is having absolutely no problem funding mortgage, home-equity, and other loan applications from…

Earlier this year, the media trotted out story after story of high gas price hardship as oil climbed to a record-high $147 a barrel back in July. One analyst even predicted in May that oil would reach $300 a barrel. But, now that a financial mess has struck the markets, oil has fallen from $140 to right around $90 a barrel on Oct. 7. During months leading up to its peak, many were forecasting…

Old Media's coverage of the recently-lifted executive and congressional bans on offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas largely overlooked an important element that should have been very relevant to the discussion. Supporters of lifting the bans surely share much of the blame for only rarely citing it. Though they have frequently noted the hundreds of billions of dollars a years…

Borrowing from the nickname for a federal earmark that would have built a multi-million dollar bridge for an Alaska town of 50 people, Newsweek's Mark Hosenball offers readers of the September 29 print magazine a look at "[Gov. Sarah] Palin's Pipeline to Nowhere." Hosenball suggests that Palin's $500-million "principal achievement" as governor "might never be built after all." But while the…