Huh ? No one says that oil companies can’t or shouldn’t profit from their efforts, but the last two recessions have reached a tipping point on the peak of high energy cost. I feel that all people should be supportive of more stable energy supplies and cost. I can’t afford to “recently acquire” a Honda fit or move to an area one would be usable. The petro and car industries are counting on people like us.
Those who are forced to pay (me) and those who don’t care (you). Cost of doing business increases yes, profiteering, no.
Remember too that that “miniscule” $0.114 per mile is figured into long haul trucking where the effects are more dramatic given the multiplier affect.
dagosa, I am looking for the points you are rebutting, but I can’t find them. You haven’t apparently contradicted anything LeMaudit25 wrote.
I feel that all people should be supportive of more stable energy supplies and cost.
So do I. How do you propose we do that?
I can’t afford to “recently acquire” a Honda fit…
Neither can I, but for many of us, there are things we can do when the time comes to buy a new car for other reasons.
Those who are forced to pay (me) and those who don’t care (you).
Please don’t mistake my casual attitude for a lack of concern for those who don’t have alternatives. I am not so callous. I do care. I wish I knew how to help. I’ve reduced my demand for oil as much as I can, and I continue to make an effort. I hope my reduced demand allows the price to drop.
Remember too that that “miniscule” $0.114 per mile is figured into long haul trucking where the effects are more dramatic given the multiplier affect.
Actually, the average semi gets between 6 and 8 MPG, making their fuel cost between $0.45 and $0.67 per mile at $4/gallon. This is a good time to be a company driver, and a bad time to be an owner/operator.
Oh yes, this is very true. When I was in Morocco a while ago, some locals got to talking about politics and such (note, Morocco is Muslim, but locals dress very similar to here in the Midwest, jeans, T-Shirt, I thought one guy even had a John Deere cap but it was in Arabic). My sister translated some of it for me, they had almost word-for-word the same view of these hardcore Iranian muslims that we have here in the US about the fundamentalist Christians (you know the kind, not the kind that are just religious at home and church, the kind that want to get science out of schools and enforce their conservatism on everyone else.) Oh yeah, it's KILLING me. That is one reason I'm planning to keep my current Buick so long. My sister needed a decent-MPG car, and we found her a Toyota Paseo a year or two ago for $800. Now? If I could find one, it'd probably be over $3000. Even the humble Chevy Cavalier has shot up in price.
On the bright side, since my Regal isn't TOO low in MPG, it's resale value has increased by over $1000 too.My response was not for you, only in the casual referral to the transportation costs. It seemed a lack of concern for the rest of us who must use fossil fuels for things other than personal transportation.
It’s not so simple. Fuel didn’t go up just because of the trouble in the middle east. The fuel prices are controlled by the companies that distribute them. Oil barrel price can go down, and that may have no effect on gas price.
As well, democracy isn’t automatically the equivalent of freedom. There are different interpretations of democracy. Some would argue that America is no longer a democracy; I would agree firmly that we have strayed far from what the people who founded the country wanted. In any case, money rules the lives of many people - you pretty much need it to survive here. Remaining on subject, look at the profit that the gas/oil related companies make. Maybe instead of the people who can’t afford to spend $4.00 a gallon, Halliburton or BP could throw some change in. The heavy political influence they have is astonishing, so I doubt their sharing will happen until they get exposed more (Hey news, something for you to write about other than the middle eastern issues and what I want to dress my cat up in!).
As a country, we could stop wasting all of our money on defense, medicaid, and social security. Maybe cut that back a bit and spend taxes more wisely. After all, the people are what make a democracy, and Libya’s population will do that if they want it bad enough.
So really, we aren’t sacrificing anything spending more money on gas except our own freedom, at our own expense and happiness, and to feed greed.
What’s bad is that, at least where I live, you need a car for everything because there’s no sort of reliable public transportation around - and no valid plans by the state to make that happen.
All in all, my point is that we, as people of America, are not contributing anything to Libya by paying more money for fuel and everything else that’s price is effected by fuel (food, other transportation including airplanes…) - I believe this just further pushes us into recession and debt.
But at least your mind is in a positive light… 
Why would I push a car 30 miles? So I could have a car that doesn’t run 30 miles away? That makes no sense.
In my day, we called Sociology the “MRS” degree. Much like Art History.
That having been said, Walmart has pretty good gas prices.
“Of course, markets are as impossible as democracy, so even there we have to stretch it a lot to pretend we have one.”
The one thing we definitely do have in petroleum is a market, specifically a futures market. Gas stations charge you based on what they think it will cost to replace current stocks, not what they actually paid for current stocks. This is common knowledge.
Wow. Der Kommissar checking in. “As a society”, I don’t buy fast food, brand-name clothing, or fountain soda. I do however own 3 cell phones. This sort of holier than thou nonsense makes me wish I could afford an obnoxious SUV.
I would blame the cold hard numbers of the core CPI which doesn’t include fuel or energy costs. You know who should have collective bargaining rights? Emergency room physicians, police officers, ambulance drivers, and air traffic controllers (they need their beauty sleep, don’t you know).
The Wobblies are so last century.
Clearly Bush is to blame.
Corporations aren’t citizens. RTMFM.
High taxes aren’t used to reduce consumption, they’re used to increase tax revenue.
The simple short term solution is to allow the citification of flex fuel cars for all new vehicles and let any small entrepreneur compete as a road side vender. Driving on methanol even with a loss of mileage of 10% or more is worth it if the cost is 30% less.
Ahh, so you advocate “allowing” “all new vehicles” to do something. Reminds me of Charlie “Tax-cheat” Rangel’s marketing of a draft as providing an “opportunity” for service.
Govt. Intervention is often needed to encourage proper marketing practices
Sometime we have to destroy a village in order to save it. The coach of government thinks you’re tense and could use a massage.
I feel that when single payer, non profit health care is the norm, the life expectancy and quality of life improves. This is only done with govt. intervention. …
Corporations are amoral.
“I feel” is a pretty lame argument, and your position is simply wrong.
“Corporations are amoral.” So? As opposed to government?
AL5000:
First, Al Gore disagrees with you. He said it was a mistake to champion ethanol and he only did it to win the Iowa caucus.
Then you wrote:
I assume what you really mean is that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the amount of energy you will get from the ehtano. Completely untrue given modern technology.
So, you’re saying you get more energy out of ethanol than you put into producing it?
Think very hard before you answer, because this is Nobel Prize territory.
I question your understanding of the three simple machines, much less modern technology.
“It’s true that massive inflation and a major devaluation of the US dollar would cause a price rise for Americans, but not necssarily in real terms for the rest of the world. Inflation in the US has been moderate, so it’s influence on the price of oil has been NEGLIGIBLE.”
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Rising fuel prices are DEFLATIONARY. Inflation doesn’t affect oil prices.
The way our country is set up, it will break us to pay more that 2-3 bucks a gallon. If someone has to pay 6 bucks per gallon vs. 3 bucks, the math adds up. If they live say 20 miles from work and they have a nice little commuter car, they pay about 21 bucks per week to get to work (30 mpg car, 3 dollar gas). If they have to pay twice that, it is effectivly docking their pay .50 an hour. ($20/40hr). How would you feel about spending the same amount if you just got YOUR pay docked?
The american dream is to have your own house and yadda yadda yadda. They way people in other countrys live is not the same. people in many other countrys can live very close to work, here in america, that is not always feasable.
We need to stop pretending that we can have both things. We can have the classic american dream, or we can live like the brittish, the asians, ect.
Personally, I like to live in the country and work in the city. I think many americans do, it’s how we do things.
We are americans, we were set up to drive cars, and to shift away from this system is not going to happen anytime soon. If gas prices go up more, it might just kill america. We need to protect ourselves, we need to keep gas prices down.
We have the oil here, we are just banned from drilling it becasue we are ‘protecting’ our country, I just hope we don’t protect ourselves to death.
America earned it’s freedom, and we are proud of that fact. Handing freedom to someone does not work. It will just go back to a (fill in the blank) government as soon as america leaves. The people must do it themselves, or it will simply revert to the path of least resistence (e.g what it was before).
Gas stations charge you based on what they think it will cost to replace current stocks, not what they actually paid for current stocks.
That’s true, but that also applies when the price of fuel is dropping. Gas stations don’t wait for their storage tanks to be empty to lower their prices. It’s a perfectly ethical thing to do. You would do the same thing if you were a retailer. Grocery stores do it too. When it freezes in Florida, the prices of oranges and strawberries increase, even on the ones they ordered before the freeze.
In my day, we called Sociology the “MRS” degree. Much like Art History.
What an incredibly sexist and shallow thing to say. I am surprised anyone would admit something so embarrassingly ignorant.
There is sound reasoning behind excluding fuel and energy costs from the CPI. When the cost of energy and fuel rises, so does everything else. The bread you buy at the grocery store, for example, already includes the cost of energy to make it and ship it, so if you count that energy a second time, you are actually counting it twice, giving it undue influence in the CPI.
This is something they teach in Macroeconomics 101. Maybe you should consider taking it.