Every once in a while I read a news story that makes me wonder it gets written and published/posted without someone saying, “Wait a second… can this be right? And if it is, shouldn’t we explain how it could possible be true???”

See, I’m old school. I still believe in things like journalistic ethics and writers not just covering the facts accurately, but anticipating which questions a story will raise and then answering them. Any news story that leaves the reader with one or more huge unanswered questions is, in my quaint view of such things, a Bad Story.

Case in point: U.S. Gasoline May Hit $4.20/Gallon by Memorial Day, Study Says, which is dated today (May 20) and begins with the following two paragraphs:

U.S. retail gasoline prices may reach $4.20 a gallon around the Memorial Day holiday as demand rises amid limited supplies, a study said.

Demand typically rises during the summer driving season, which begins with the Memorial Day holiday, on May 26 this year, Kenneth Medlock III, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said in a statement today on the study.

Since the average retail price of unleaded gasoline in the US is $3.80/gallon (as the article itself points out), this article seems to be saying that we will see another rise of 40 cents/gallon in just a few days.

Since no one seemed to bother asking this about the article, let me don my Journalism Man tights and cape and leap into action and ask, “Can this be right?”

Well, as a crude measurement, let us look at the historical record. If you go the EIA page with gasoline price data, you can download a spreadsheet with all the numbers from August 1990 until yesterday. (See link in the upper-left corner of that page.)

Doing minimal programming with the data in column E, “U.S. Regular All Formulations Retail Gasoline Prices (Cents per Gallon)”, shows that the week-to-week changes are, as one might expect, normally pretty small. In fact, only once have we seen a movement up or down of more than 40 cents/gallon in a week, and that was 45.9 cents/gallon in the September 5, 2005 data point, when gasoline reached the unheard of price of (brace yourself) $3.06/gallon. That was right after hurricanes cut a swath through the Gulf of Mexico and the New Orleans area, and the next two weeks the price fell by 11.4 and 16.9 cents/gallon. The data shows no one-week movements in the 20-to-40 cent/gallon range, but quite a few between 10 and 20 cents/gallon.

So, it seems that this study is predicting something Really, Really Unusual will happen to make prices leap that much. What could that be? A war? A big announcement of a major production cut by OPEC or one of the major non-OPEC oil exporters?

Careful readers are probably waiting for me to say something about the fuzzy time frame–”around Memorial Day”. Which brings up yet another uncomfortable question: Does the study actually say “around Memorial Day”, or is that a characterization by the reporter? If the study is hyper precise on the price but fuzzy on the time frame, that says something odd about the study; if the study says something specific, like the price of gasoline will average $4.20/gallon for the first week following Memorial Day (just to make up an example), and the reporter knew it, then the reporter has some explainin’ to do.

Note that I’m assuming “U.S. retail gasoline prices may reach $4.20 a gallon” refers to the average US price rising to that level, as I’m sure there are plenty of spots where gasoline has already exceeded that price, which would make the study pretty meaningless.

So, what’s the point of this exercise in nano-nit picking? Simply this: Please be extremely careful when you read articles about energy and environmental issues. Always be on the lookout for assumptions and missing data and bias, which can be horrifically tough to find at times (although I don’t think there’s anything like that at play in the article in question). And most of all, keep your antennae raised for unanswered questions; sometimes they tell you more than the information in the article.

Before anyone jumps on me and asks how I know that gasoline prices won’t leap by 40 cents in about a week, let me spell this out: I’m not saying that they won’t. My crystal ball isn’t nearly good enough for me to put my name on that cut-and-dried a prediction. I’m merely pointing out that that the historical record clearly suggests it would take something pretty remarkable for that sharp a price increase to materialize, so it appears to be a very low probability event. If we had just a bit more information about the study we might be able to make a better assessment of the probability.

And if the reporter didn’t have access to the information (or had it under a press embargo) and had said, “When asked what might trigger gasoline prices to jump so dramatically, the study’s author declined to comment”, then we would know pretty clearly that the article was effectively little more than a free ad for the study, even if that was not the intention.