By Daniel B. Wood | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
STUDIO CITY, CALIF. – As Los Angeles motorist Jill Cantrell removes the pump nozzle from her Honda Civic gas tank, she spouts out two figures: "$56 for a gas tank for me and $78 billion in profits last year for the oil companies," she says. "I'm livid."

How many other Californians are angry about gasoline prices - and ready for their state to take action - will be clear this November, when voters decide whether to levy a new tax on oil companies that drill in California and use the money for in-state development of alternative fuels.

Gas Prices Record Steepest Decline Since November
By Tomoeh Murakami Tse and Chris Kirkham
Washington Post Staff Writers

The declining prices of crude oil and ethanol combined with rising gasoline supplies have brought a bit of welcome relief at the pump as the summer driving season draws to a close.

Average gas prices have dropped about 15 cents in the past two weeks, to $2.87 per gallon nationwide and $2.99 in the Washington metropolitan region, Trilby Lundberg, editor of the Lundberg Survey, said yesterday. The gasoline monitor surveys more than 6,000 stations nationwide every two weeks.

TOLEDO, Ohio,
The Chrysler Group, which depends more heavily on sales of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles than any other Detroit automaker, said Monday that it expected gasoline prices to remain at $3 to $4 a gallon for the rest of this decade.

The comments by Thomas W. LaSorda, Chrysler’s chief executive, are the first time a Detroit automaker has issued a specific forecast on gas prices since they began climbing to $3 a gallon and higher.

By Jessica Jaganathan Wed Aug 16, 9:08 PM ET

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singaporean Kom Mam Sun ran his Nissan truck on biodiesel fuel for two years to test his business idea of turning used cooking oil from restaurants into fuel for vehicles.

The experiment was such a success that the 32-year-old entrepreneur opened his first biodiesel plant in June and has already made S$50,000 ($31,600) in profits.

Green Car Congress
China, already the world’s third largest ethanol producer, is planning on a dramatic expansion of its production and use of biofuels for transportation from about 1 million tonnes of ethanol and biodiesel in 2005 to 12 million tonnes in 2020. Twelve million tonnes of biofuels would represent about 15% of the transportation fuel pool in 2020.

In China, diesel consumption is twice that of gasoline. Therefore, of that 12 million tonnes of biofuels, China wants biodiesel to represent 8 million (about 2.4 billion gallons US), according to a recent report by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. With biodiesel production in 2005 at only 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes (30 million to 60 million gallons) that represents at least 3,900% growth in 15 years...

Alfred Runte, Seattle Times via Common Dreams
Here we go again — blaming everything on the oil companies for the spiraling cost of gasoline. How about we try something positive for a change, say, restoring our passenger trains?

For decades, Europe has paid double what the U.S. pays for gas, and just look at the trains they have. Every day, thousands of passenger trains — conventional and high-speed — whisk tourists and business people across the continent.

Erik Curren, Augusta Free Press
Have you been infected yet? I mean with ethanol mania?

It's not clear yet whether it started with Midwest corn farmers, hippie do-it-yourselfers or Brazilians who swear that ethanol will soon free them from foreign oil. But now it's spread to Washington and Wall Street, and no political persuasion appears to be immune. President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and the traders at Goldman Sachs have all become ethanol maniacs.

by Warren Brown

There is no cheap gasoline.

Accept that.

Now get on with your Memorial Day weekend and summer travels, and have a good time.

I'm serious.

End the silliness. Stop worrying about whether gasoline will go up to $4 a gallon. It will. In some California communities, the price is already there. Stop running around all over the place wasting time and the gasoline you have looking for fuel a few cents a gallon cheaper. What's the point? You save 10 cents and lose 10 minutes. You can always find another 10 cents. What about the 10 minutes?

Jeremy Leggett, Guardian
Cars are killing the planet. The carbon arithmetic allows no other conclusion. But there is an alternative.
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The Economist debate at the Hay festival this year asked the question "are cars killing the planet". Yes, I argued, they are, to the extent that people as they are currently designing and using cars are playing a major role in killing the planet.

Dave Carpenter, Associated Press via Yahoo!News
...Solutions for high gasoline prices might seem painfully far off to drivers as summer travel season begins, but experts say the skyrocketing costs of oil and gas have given new momentum to the push to develop alternative fuels and alternative energy sources.

The efforts are readily apparent in the nation's heartland, where a boom in ethanol is expanding and scientists at laboratories far and wide are working to turn agricultural waste or "biomass" such as switchgrass, wheat straw, cornstalks and miscanthus into a fuel called cellulosic ethanol that could be produced commercially to reduce U.S. dependence on oil.