The politics of petroleum & energy costs
 

Background: While listing to an Adam Curry podcast, I heard him comment on the price of gas -- but his angle wasn't just focused on the price at the pump, but rather on the earnings reports of the petroleum industry (making huge profits). To increase "profit" when the supply price is going up, one must not *merely* keep up with the supply price, one must tack a little padding on the price as well before passing it along to consumers.

Back to the point of the post... the next day a listener sent him some feedback saying "if you want to know why the price of oil & gas is so high, go check out www.OpenSecrets.org..."

OpenSecrets.org is a campaign finance site. It shows where the finance money is coming from and where it's going to.

Here's a couple of more specific URLs:

The tables & graphs in this look show donations to politicians from the oil & gas industry. The 'Rank" column in the table is the how this industry compares to other industries. You can see that overall, oil & gas would be considered to be a top-10 campaign contributor. 2004 & 2006 are interesting years - you'll notice the bar-graph in the upper left no longer shows "soft-money" (campaign finance reforms).

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?Ind=E01

This next link shows more granularity within those donations... specifically, which companies are giving, how much they gave, and what percentage they gave to each parties. Most companies give to both companies, but you can see there's a pretty obvious republican party slant (they give about 5 times as much to the replication party candidates). This table is for the 2004 election year -- you can check other years if you want.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industrie...E01&Cycle=2004

The conclusion drawn here, is that the politicians tend to take care of those most generous donors. Top-10 donors tend to get what they want.