Before we "figure out" what the next president will or can do about climbing gas price, we need to first figure out why the gas prices are so high. 

The reasons why gasoline prices fluctuate could be:

• seasonality in the demand for gasoline 

• changes in the cost of crude oil 

• product supply/demand imbalances 

Another hidden factor is the trading and manipulation of oil prices. For example, US had 347 million barrels of crude oil in storage in 2006 which was more than that in 1998. Yet, the crude oil cost $70 per barrel in 2006 vs $15 per barrel in 1998. The same is true worldwide. Demand has indeed gone up, as China, India and other countries begin to use more oil. But supply has gone up even more. As the CEO of the global energy giant BP recently acknowledged: "The price of oil has gone up while nothing has changed physically."

That gas and oil trading market is a complicated web of buying and selling, but basically it works like this: buyers purchase contracts for certain amounts of oil by paying for the oil immediately though it may not be delivered until a future date. Some of these buyers are oil companies that need oil for their refineries; others are speculators betting that the price of oil will go up before the oil has to be delivered. Before delivery, these contracts might be exchanged many times between other buyers and sellers.

Commodities markets are ordinarily policed by the government to make sure that buyers and sellers are not artificially and illegally manipulating the prices. Enron, however, punched a giant hole in the regulation of energy markets. In the 1990s, Enron developed a way for companies to trade energy futures electronically, outside of the regulated markets in New York and elsewhere. Enron collapsed, but its concept of unregulated energy trading took off. The unregulated, electronic markets in the U.S. now directly compete with the regulated markets. With no one looking over their shoulders, financial speculators have begun pouring tens of billions of dollars into trading oil and natural gas commodities, and they are hauling in record profits.

The bottom line is that today there is no cop on the beat in the oil and gas market. We don't know how much is being sold, by whom, or for what price. And therefore we can't know if prices are being manipulated, or simply why oil is so expensive even though there is enough supply.

So things the next president can or should do is to make the right policies to reduce the demand on oil with alternative energy options and reduce the profits oil or gas traders make with the cost of ordinary consumers.