Max Baucus: “in the 12th century, in the Bay of Biscay, Basque sailors began to hunt right whales. The Basques melted the whales'…”

“in the 12th century, in the Bay of Biscay, Basque sailors began to hunt right whales. The Basques melted the whales' blubber into oil to fuel their lamps. When the whales died out in Spanish waters, the Basques sailed north to Iceland pursuing the source of their lamp oil. By the 16th century, whalers hunted extensively in Icelandic waters to find the fuel for light. As our former colleague Phil Gramm wrote in 1973, from American colonial times through the middle of the 19th century, whale oil provided the major source of artificial lighting in America and Europe. But in the middle of the 19th century, America faced an energy crisis. The price of whale oil was rising. From a low of 23 cents a gallon in 1832, it rose to $1.45 a gallon in 1865. But then in 1859, people discovered petroleum oil in western Pennsylvania. The rising price of whale oil encouraged an engineer to invent a process to convert that western Pennsylvania black oil into a new fuel, kerosene. The whale oil era was ending, and the petroleum era began. One hundred fifty years later, at the turn of the 21st century, gasoline prices are rising. As late as December 2002, Montana gasoline prices averaged a little more than $1.30 a gallon. On September 5 of this year, the average price hit about $2.90 a gallon. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's disruption of oil refineries, many Montanans feel gouged by sky-high gasoline and diesel prices. High gas prices hit low-income Montanans particularly hard.…”