In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, more than a few preening peacocks are parading themselves before the television cameras as energy pundits. Give these self-anointed energy seers their due. They know what sells. It's the same recycled script Hollywood has been peddling for decades: big is bad and Big Oil is worse yet. Interestingly, Hollywood is situated in California, one of the world's largest consumers of oil, guzzling more than 2 million barrels a day-mostly for choking levels of transportation. Nevertheless, as one California-based energy analyst once observed, "This is a state where people drive fairly inefficient vehicles to Sierra Club meetings to tell the rest of the world not to drill for oil." Meanwhile, onshore and offshore California, there's an estimated 70 billion barrels of oil equivalent of resource potential that will likely never be tapped because of this self-indulgent mindset. But back to the boob-tube pundits. Their theme in early September: price gouging by oil companies. To support this thesis, some cited the record second-quarter, pre-Katrina profits of all the major oils and the 2004 salaries of these companies' heads. Absent from their rants, however, was any mention of such elemental economic issues as supply and demand. Conveniently, they ignored a decades-long public policy that has placed some of the richest domestic oil frontiers off limits to drilling. Too, they seemed unaware that U.S. oil consumption has been rising 2% annually-to a current level of 22 million barrels per day-and that recent hysterical speculation in the futures market has added between $10 and $15 to current crude prices. These posturing pundits also appeared clueless that the U.S.-precisely because of restrictions on domestic drilling-has now become more than 60% dependent on foreign oil, largely from a cartel that, if it so desired, could still pump another 2 million barrels per day to world oil markets. Overlooked as well was the salient fact that not a single new domestic refinery has been built in the past 30-plus years. The result: the mother of all energy bottlenecks. No matter how much oil can be pumped each day into the U.S. energy infrastructure, the country's daily crude refining capacity can only handle slightly more than 17 million barrels of it-about the same level as in 1982. This media criticism aside, the industry itself isn't entirely without blame for negative public perception of it. Classic case in point: as Hurricane Katrina was still battering New Orleans, Becky Keating, a resident on Block Island off the northeastern tip of New York's Long Island, was second in line to gas up her car at a local service station. The posted price: $3.03 per gallon. However, before she could pull up to the pump, the dealer abruptly posted a new gasoline price: $3.88. During this time, no tanker truck added new gasoline supply to the station's underground storage tank and no refinery dislocation had yet occurred. Similarly, prices at service stations in Littleton, Colorado, jumped from $2.55 the day before Katrina to $2.79 the next afternoon, to $2.99 that night. Again, the dealers hadn't received any new gasoline supply. Price gouging? You bet. And the industry better wake up. Big Oil is being blamed for it-not those local dealers behaving like real-time traders on the floor of the Nymex. One solution: industry executives should use television news or financial talk shows to inform the public why there has been such a disparity recently between gasoline prices at the refinery gate and those set by opportunistic service-station dealers. They should also be prepared to talk about future gasoline prices. Then there's the human dimension to the Katrina tragedy. Given that the major oils have tens of billions of dollars invested onshore and offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama-and are major employers and citizens of communities in that stricken region-it was puzzling to note the following: ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, whose combined market cap is more than $640 billion, only committed an aggregate $15 million of hurricane relief assistance while Wal-Mart, a $191-billion market-cap retailer, donated $17 million. The message: don't let negative perception become reality.