Real price of Gas:

[jrittenhouse]

Back when I was young - we’ll say when I was 10, 1967 - gasoline generally cost about $0.32 per gallon.  Gas Wars would occasionally come up where there’d be a thrash over what sort of extras (glasses with a fill-up, etc.) would pull the business in - and sometimes, it was brute-force-drop-the-price.  I can remember seeing an occasional drop to say

Comments

[astro_not1]

Another factor to keep in mind is that (despite the fact that some will say I'm dead wrong) back in the late 1960's the stations got 2 to 5 cents per gallon as their share. There are those who insist that is still the case (especially some of the station operators, who want us to feel sorry for them), but that is highly unlikely given that if that were the case there would be no independent stations at all because even with the exhorbitant prices they charge for everything else they sell they would not be able to stay in business.
Something else to keep in mind is the fact that the price of a barrel of oil noted in the news is the spot price, or what you would pay today if you went out to the oil field and tried to buy some (since that oil won't be delivered to the refineries for weeks or months). It has no bearing on the actual cost of the gasoline or diesel fuel being purchased today, so this is just a price gouge by the oil conglomerate to boost profits. There was a wonderful tool used back around 1977 called the Windfall Profits Tax, which caused a 20% reduction in fuel prices within days of its going into effect. How that tax got repealed is a question I wish I could answer (or did it just get forgotten under Reagan and Clinton and Obama didn't pick it back up?). We need that tax to be enforced again, since it would bring fuel prices down again.
At $100 per barrel, a gallon of oil costs about $1.82. That gallon of oil produces some gasoline, some diesel fuel, and a number of other petrochemicals, which all bring in far more than that $1.82, assuming you believe the oil conglomerate actually pays those prices for the oil. I do not. If they did, their profits would be less than 30% of what has been reported. The amounts of which type of product is refined from the oil have been pretty stable for decades, because the oil conglomerate knows the ratio it needs to maximize the profit from each gallon of oil.
For those who think taxes are a major part of fuel prices, it would probably behoove them to know that the average tax on gasoline nationwide is around 45 cents per gallon (taking all taxes into account). There are some places, like Cook County, IL, where those taxes are a little higher, and others, like the state of Georgia, where they are a little lower, but overall the taxes are a minor portion of the price of a gallon of fuel.
All in all, it is past time to move to cleaner sources of energy. Naysayers tell us we can never harvest enough solar or wind energy to keep our civilization going, but I think they're too pessimistic, and haven't looked at some of the strides that have been made in alternative energy sources in just the last decade, nor are they willing to accept that bigger strides can be made with sufficient research and development.