The Coming Public Outrage Over High Gas Prices?

I paid $3.05 a gallon for gas yesterday when I filled up the tank. It was the first time I've ever paid more than three bucks a gallon, and it certainly hits the wallet hard. I'm not that upset about it, and I don't worry that it will destabilize the economy. There are, however, increasing signs of an upsurge of public anger over high gas prices, and especially the seemingly windfall corporate profits, most recently Chevron's $4 billion profit for the first quarter.

Virginia Postrel has a neat post on her blog suggesting that oil price increases come and go, and the best response to the current "oil crisis" is to let markets adjust through supply and demand forces. Check out as well U.S. News and World Report's cover story on the new frontier in petroleum markets. It turns out that Alberta, Canada's, oil sands region holds as much as 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale reserves, totaling more than triple of Saudi Arabia's known proven reserves. Dozens of petroleum concerns have swamped the Canadian fields in search of a new mother load. The article points out that in the U.S., Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah might possibly have as much as 2 trillion barrels of the oil shale, which is more than all the crude that's ever been produced in the history of petroleum exploration and extraction!