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There are a lot of reasons why oil is high.
In no specific order.
1. There is an increased demand worldwide. with more people wanting to buy it (china and india among others) it causes the price to rise.
2. speculators. I read today that about 10 years ago only about 10% of oil was bought and sold on the commodities market by speculators. Deregulation of that has changed that and today they think the actual number is around 60% and profit margins for those speculating can be very high they estimate if oil is $115 a barrel about $50-$60 of that price goes into a hedge fund profit.
3. The weak dollar. The more the value of our money drops the more we have to pay for oil.
4. We use a lot. We have built our society around the car and we have no choice but to use it so useage continues to rise even as prices rise.
5. Refining. We can't seem to refine the oil fast enough to meet fuel demands. I'm not sure why that is, but that is what the oil companies say.
6. We pay whatever they want us to pay. They can charge us $500 a barrel and we would pay it because we have no choice.
7. Any kind of unrest in the middle east will cause prices to rise because it means there could be a danger to the supply.
Drilling today would mean it would be 6-10 years before you would see a drop of that oil in our gas tanks. If we don't change our way of thinking we will forever be stuck on oil. We have a chance right now to force ourselves to get off the addiction and move in a way that makes us less dependent on others.
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