Conor here: The author of the following piece focuses on four items: the cost of crude, refining, marketing and distribution, and taxes. I’m no economist, but he seems to be missing one key ingredient: profit. For some insight on that front we can turn to a March 10 piece by Hal Singer in Washington Monthly : We don’t have to speculate. We can check the receipts from the last energy crisis. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, crude oil prices rose by about 71 cents per gallon. But retail gas prices jumped roughly $1.50 per gallon. That’s a 79-cent gap—pure profit for refiners and gas stations, pocketed under the fog of war. California’s Division of Petroleum Market Oversight (DPMO) confirmed this finding in an October 2025 report : Every price spike they studied—2019, 2022, 2023—also constituted a profit spike. Retail prices surged well beyond what increases in crude oil costs could explain. And when wholesale prices eventually dropped, gas stations kept their prices high, also to their windfall.…