KEEPING THE GOOD OLD DAYS IN PERSPECTIVE. More moaning from the uninformed newscasters (excuse the redundancy) about the high price of gasoline. Tyler at Marginal Revolution has some information about what price constitutes expensive gasoline ($2.80 a gallon; if the Blogger archives are working properly, you read it here last year.)

The average price of gasoline during the 1950s was about $1.80 in today's money--meaning that during the period enshrined in our collective political nostalgia as Energy Heaven, gasoline cost slightly more in real dollars than the amount now being theatrically bemoaned as a "record" price. But wait; in the 1950s, per-capita real income was less than half what it is today. That means that for the typical American in the 1950s, gasoline cost twice as much, in terms of buying power, as today's gasoline.

(Gregg Easterbrook.)

The $100 bill left on the sidewalk is this: why does the transition from winter gas prices to summer gas prices continue to have this price spike, year after year. One would think there is some money to be made in the right kind of hedging and stockpiling. Or is the real cost of tankage so high as to preclude such strategies?