If you’ve used put gasoline in your tank recently, you’ve noticed the per gallon price steadily rising:

The national average pump price increased nearly 3 cents overnight to $2.391 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. Gasoline prices ticked higher every day this month.

A good part of the reason for the escalation is seasonal in nature. Pump prices always rise just before the Memorial Day weekend which marks the start of the summer “driving season.”

But there’s more to it than that. Various factors are at play, including recent refinery fires, optimism in the equities markets and the strength of the dollar. A new report from the U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday said crude-oil stockpiles dropped by 2.1 million barrels for the week that ended Friday. One factor keeping prices lower was the glut of oil sitting in storage tanks around the nation. As those supplies get drained down, we should expect to see gasoline above two dollars for quite a while.

With oil above $60 per barrel and climbing, the oil companies are talking about ramping up exploration and production activities again. Once the price moves into the $70 to $80 range, they move beyond just talking and start doing. But they will be looking for and extracting oil in pretty much the same places where they left off when oil prices dropped through the floor.

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Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, Republican of Irvine, is running for Senate in the hopes of challenging and defeating Senator Barbara Boxer (Dunce-California) in November 2010. He’s gotten off to an early start, but he needs it, because he’s definitely an underdog. California has not elected a Republican Senator since Pete Wilson in 1986, nor have we elected a pro-life politician to a statewide office since Attorney General Dan Lungren won in 1994, and before that the re-election of Governor George Deukmejian in 1986. It’s been a long time.

Chuck DeVore has a plan, though. During a conference call today with online activists and ‘bloggers,’ which your reporter was able to listen in on, he said that he’s consciously attempting to mimic the successful strategies followed by Barack Obama in his underdog victory over Hillary Clinton last year. He intends to use the Internet and the grass roots to get more done than Republicans in his position have in the past.

He’s ready on the issues, too, and not just the tools of politics.

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A bunch of bureaucrats in Sacramento are about to give California and the rest of the nation a license to drill for more American oil.

In an effort to save the environment, the California Air Resources Board has come up with a set of Low Carbon Fuel Standards that measure the carbon footprint of different kinds of fuels.

As it turns out, the Air Resources Board has determined that oil-based fuels have a smaller carbon footprint than ethanol or other biofuels.

Seeing as how oil-based fuel has a smaller carbon footprint than ethanol, this pretty much opens the door for more drilling of American oil – perhaps right off the California coast.  And we all know that, as California goes, so goes the rest of the nation.  Pretty soon, we can expect oil rigs popping up from ANWR to the Gulf of Mexico to the Virginia and North Carolina coast.

Now, there’s a group of scientists who are not happy with this determination that oil-based fuels have a smaller carbon footprint than ethanol, and they have sent a letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger, informing him of this misguided decision by the Air Resources Board.

This letter to The Governator pleading for him to do something might work, but this could be Arnold’s shrewdest political move ever – using a bunch of environmental wacko bureaucrats to pave the way for more domestic drilling in the name of the environment.  To the California Air Resources Board, we say, this is one small step for common sense, one giant leap for US energy independence.

California has always been a destructive force in American politics. All too often the worst ideas from the farthest Euro-left spectrum have leaked out of the Golden State to blight the rest of America. Just one of those currently destructive ideas is the absurdly stringent fuel economy standards that California has foolishly enacted. Several western states have pegged their standards to California’s and many other states are attempting to do the same. The current effort in Illinois is one of those attempts.

Illinois H.B. 422 (see .pdf of legislation), sponsored by Karen May (D, Highland Park) creates the Illinois Clean Air Act establishing new motor vehicle emission standards based on California’s Low Emission Vehicle Program requirements.

Many in the business community in Illinois oppose this legislation for the unduly stringent requirements it would impose on the state, among other reasons. But a compelling one for me is the simple matter of Illinois allowing its laws to be crafted by Californians. What sense does it make for a state in the central part of the country to allow a state thousands of miles away, one that has vastly different environmental conditions, to write laws that will affect its own citizens? This idea alone is so unAmerican that it boggles the mind.

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Let’s put aside for the moment that this story is from PMSNBC and “Bush era” refers to the long-past times of approximately six months ago.  In the latest in a series of panders nods to the desires of his Leftist supporters, the President has overturned President Bush’s offshore drilling plan.

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