As YouTube Climate Town analyst explains, the answer is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that there is no one to whom you can point, leverage and set prices at all. The opposite in fact. There is a cartel that throws a big lever to set gas prices, but even they face factors out of control. Gas prices are more directly related to the price of crude oil, so the biggest factor in this price is fluctuations in the geopolitical landscape and the global economy that affect both supply and demand. However, this does not mean that no one has a direct hand in the price of oil. While the general dependence of the world on oil for almost everything means that demand is almost entirely linked to the state of the world, supply is certainly open to manipulation. This leaves room for people to extract this oil from the ground, both the multinational oil companies and the OPEC + cartel, which directly manipulates supply from countries with nationalized oil reserves, to keep prices artificially high in order to maximize profits by length of this curve. OPEC should be familiar to every car audience. It was OPEC that cut America off from oil supplies that triggered the 1973 gas crisis. OPEC + now includes Russia, but it’s not that Russia did anything big in the world of politics, war or oil control. last ! Where things started to get difficult was the COVID-19 pandemic, which briefly broke the whole process of pricing, radically reducing oil demand in 2020. Companies that previously maximized oil production went through a huge cycle of reduced production. and redundancies. This was not a small blow. US oil companies have laid off thousands of workers as prices plummeted. For one day in April 2020, demand was so low that future barrel oil prices were actually a bit negative. Our government intervened and paid these companies as immediate assistance to keep their current businesses alive. After all this monetary support, have US oil companies rehired their employees and taken on enough production to cut gas prices? Not at all! Production remains low. High gas prices, after all, are only positive for oil companies and their shareholders. There was no economic incentive to escalate, even as gas prices rose more and more. In fact, you can hear Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources and America’s largest shale producer, say in his own words in the Climate Town video, stating that he does not care if oil prices rise to 100, 150 , $ 200 a barrel. , has no plans to increase production. (He just recently scored $ 120 / barrel from the post, with the national average a few cents away from $ 5 a gallon.) As a result, oil production is not in line with demand and, with low supply, prices for both domestic and imported oil have remained artificially high. In other words, the price of oil is not directly controlled by anyone, but oil companies and cartels still have the power to manipulate it and extend to their advantage trends related to external economic and political implications. So while they are not directly responsible for the current high gas prices, they have played their part in preventing them from falling sooner. This content is created and maintained by a third party and is inserted into this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may find more information about it and similar content at piano.io
