Right before my hiatus, someone sent me an interesting article about the real cost of gas. I finally made time to read it today. Here’s an excerpt:

Milton Copulos, an economist with the National Defense Council Foundation, a right-of-center Washington think tank, spent 18 months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America’s addiction to global crude….

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos? Eight dollars a gallon, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last spring… When he isolated hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11… Consumers pay for these expenditures indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt — increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their oil habit.

“Gas isn’t too expensive,” Copulos said. “It’s way, way too cheap.”

“War, corruption claim heavy toll in Iraqi oil fields,” Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune