s the price of gasoline at the pump was heading toward $4, the Democrats in Congress decided it would be a good time to grill the CEOs of several large oil companies in a hearing (AKA a kangaroo court). They have been staging this morality play off and on for at least 30 years—since the first Arab oil embargo in the early 70s.

The plot is always the same: Greedy oil companies are gouging helpless consumers and the Congressional prosecutors want to play well on the evening news with the hope that Mr. and Ms. America will conclude that high gasoline prices are, indeed, caused by greedy oil company executives.

At these morality plays, unlike the jurisprudence system, the accused is guilty unless proved innocent, which is impossible to accomplish. The oil company executives patiently explain that theirs is a cyclical business; that exploration and development are very costly; that some investments yield little oil; and that the good profits in some years must sustain the companies in bad years.

No one pays much attention to these recitations because the verdict was determined before the play began: guilty.

In fact, their explanation of oil business cycles are correct, but there are several other reasons – some of them new – why a barrel of oil keeps going up in price. First, the galloping economies of China and India area creating a huge demand with no easing in sight; second, Nigeria may not come up with the needed capital to sustain its joint venture with Royal Dutch Shell. In the months ahead, production may be sharply curtailed. Third, it was announced last month that Russia’s daily output has peaked at 10 million barrels a day and is expected to begin declining slowly but surely.

The last two events, in particular, have the oil futures market on edge. Heavy demand and uncertain supply lead to higher prices. Hence, $4-a-gallon gasoline.

Gasoline is not the only thing that is going up. Many food items are as well. A good deal of this can be traced to Congress’s passage of the Law of Unintended Consequences when it created large subsidies for corn-based ethanol. As such, tens of thousands of acres have been turned from other crops to corn, and the regular corn-growing areas are selling more and more of it for ethanol refining. Result: Corn goes for higher prices. An added downside: Corn-based ethanol does not get better mileage than gasoline and, because it is created in the Midwest, must be trucked to either coast—an added source of carbon emissions. Further, the refining process uses a great deal of water, thus creating worries about water tables.

Had Congress increased sugar quotas two or three years ago, we could now be importing sugar-cane-based ethanol from Brazil. What stands in the way is the powerful U.S. sugar lobby, which has been able to maintain strict quotas from foreign sources for decades.

Congress stubbornly sticks to the agenda of the ultra-environmentalist when it comes to extracting oil from U.S. soil: in Alaska’s ANWR and the continental shelf in Florida and California. The argument that drilling harms wildlife is specious. As anyone who has visited the Alaska pipeline or been in a boat near an oil platform knows, the wildlife is oblivious to the presence of these things. The long-range objective of the ultra-environmentalists’ opposition to drilling is to reduce our industrialized economy. Just enough members of Congress have fallen for this to ensure continued high prices at the pump for your gasoline.