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Reasons for high oil and gasoline prices:

Speculators? Yes.

Limitations on drilling in certain places? Yes.

The "fear factor" of international tensions? Yes.

Rapidly (astonishingly) increasing demand from countries such as China and India, which are car-ifying at a lightning pace? Yes.

Lack of adequate refining capacity for present demand trends on both national and global scales? Yes.

Rapidly decreasing exports from major supplier countries that are finding they need to keep more of their oil at home? Yes.

The imminent, or already occurring, all-time peak in the amount of global oil extraction and production? YES.

The U.S. dumping oil into its Strategic Petroleum Reserve: NO, at least not presently, since the decision was recently made to suspend that practice in the interest of trying to manage the spike in prices.

Ladies and gentlemen, the oil isn't about to run out. It's about to reach or has reached its all-time peak of supply. We're pumping more oil now than we ever have before or ever will again. But -- and here's the catch -- it's only downhill from here, after a plateau that will last several years or maybe over a decade. And the entire modern global industrial/technological economic system was built on the assumption of limitless, cheap, and always-increasing inputs of energy from fossil fuels. When that goes away, so does this way of life. Prices spiral permanently out of the reach of most people. Cities, regions, and nations whose ways of life are built upon and around energy-intensive practices -- e.g., automobile travel on a mass scale, urban living with gargantuan buildings, suburban living with extended commutes, food production based on fossil fuel inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, packaging, transport, etc.) -- all of these will collapse and/or mutate into drastically new modes and forms of living.

The basics of peak oil theory are accepted by everybody now, even skeptics like Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), whose uber-optimistic future forecasts for limitless oil production were a mainstay of pollyanas everywhere until just last year. Even such former naysayers as the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) have now come around to making pretty dire forecasts.

All of the above-named reasons for high oil and gas prices are in play. And yes, natural gas will follow suit. But the basic, underlying reason is geological, and it is insurmountable.

You're welcome, Glen, and thanks for the interest. I hope my chiming is more effective now that I've corrected the hundred and one typos and dropped words that afflicted my original, hastily composed post.