Heres my take on the high price of petroleum, and this is what happens when you elect oil people into office.

A few years ago, congress authorized drilling alaska, and other remote national wildlife reserves. At the time petroleum was relatively cheap, so the cost of exploration, drilling and trasportation would be prohibitively high. Add in the unpopular war in Iraq (which failed to pay for itself by using Iraqi oil reserves), the convenient shut-down of refineries for "scheduled maintenance", plus China discovering capitlaism and emerging as new big time petroleum consumer/competitor for petroleum products which conveniently drives up the price of oil to over $60/barrel.

Guess what? It now becomes profitable to drill and exploit distant reserves.