Getting it together on inflation

This is really good, from a progressive perspective, on where the issue is at. My only quibble with it is, the first thing I'd like to see is the most egregious corporate players brought up on criminal charges (collusion, market manipulation).

It's worth watching, right now, as to whether Big Oil tries to use the pending hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico to run up gas prices in order to, along with shameless greedhead profiteering, influence the upcoming election.

Yet conservative economic theory, like that trumpeted by Friedman, still drives the story we hear repeated ad nauseam in mainstream discussions of inflation: increased wages and government spending are to blame. Only the Federal Reserve can beat inflation by ​“cooling” the economy. The government’s only role is to refrain from substantive spending.

Biden could have invoked executive powers to institute targeted price controls and invest in production, but he didn’t. Instead, the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates, and the administration’s landmark social spending bill, Build Back Better, got whittled down and reframed into the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes some positive gains (like corporate taxes and reduced drug prices) but operates within the confines of conservative monetary justifications.

To articulate and fight for an alternative solution to inflation, we need to radically shift the economic discourse to the left. - In These Times

Americans are driving and paying, just like always

I don't claim to know how things are going to end up, including politically.

“For now, gasoline demand has shown absolutely no signs of buckling under the pressure of higher prices, even as California nears an average of $6 per gallon,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

“It’s not impossible that gas prices would still have to climb a considerable amount for Americans to start curbing their insatiable demand for gasoline,” he said.

With the market slow to curb U.S. oil consumption, some experts are urging more action from governments — including leaders calling for more voluntary conservation.

The International Energy Agency — the West’s counterpart to OPEC — (two weeks ago) published a four-month plan to cut oil consumption by 2.7 million barrels a day, equivalent to all the cars in China.

The10-point plan calls for reducing highway speed limits by about 6 mph (estimated to save 290,000 barrels daily), working from home three days a week (170,000 barrels a day) and curtailing air travel for business (260,000 barrels daily).

Many of those practices echo pandemic-era behaviors, so they’re proven to be within reach, said Pete Erickson, climate policy program director at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Such efforts could still meaningfully impact energy markets, he added, without the disruption, isolation or scale of Covid-19’s lockdowns.

“From the perspective of trying to fill a Russia-size hole in the global oil market, it’s really significant what we’ve shown we can do through behavioral measures,” Erickson said.

“The U.S. is a major player in the oil market. It can make changes in its consumption faster than in its production — we have direct proof of that. And the scale of that [change] really matters,” he said.

To be sure, this approach is very different from what’s needed in the long term for climate, Erickson added. This short-term strategy doesn’t require building new infrastructure. That’s why it can work so quickly, but it’s also the reason it’s insufficient for deep and long-term change. - E&E News