Ran across two nice blogbites in one article recently:

It’s not a record high. It only looks that way if you don’t adjust for inflation. And that’s just silly. It’s like saying the movie “Rush Hour II” out-earned “Gone with the Wind.” The media should quote prices in real dollars, but when they get excited, they don’t. As the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) acknowledges, once you adjust for inflation, it turns out that gasoline cost more 25 years ago in 1981.

Inflation makes a difference! So does perspective:

And gasoline is still a bargain. Think about what it takes to bring it to us: Drills must bend and dig sideways through as many as seven miles of Earth. What they find has to be delivered through long pipelines or transported in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three different formulas of gasoline, moved in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each, and shipped to gas stations that have to have lots of expensive equipment to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up filling the tank. Even after all that, gasoline is still cheaper per ounce than the bottled water gas stations sell.

The article is from John Stossel