Apparently, you believe I was born yesterday
I am well aware of how things work...I was just being ...hopeful? Is that the word I want to use?
Ah, but you were, young man.
(pssst...I'm two years older 
)
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gas prices
- Thread starter plexibass
- Start date
Ah, but you were, young man.
(pssst...I'm two years older )
I completely agree and said as much earlier in this thread.
Your eventual reality assumes that my salary increases won't keep pace with or outpace the increased cost of living and driving to work.
That aside, my work situation is such that my time actually spent in the office is rather minimal and any mileage I incur beyond the trip to and from Metairie is billable to the client at 50.5 cents per mile. Problem solved.
But let's assume your scenarion rings true at some point in my life. Will I stop the commute? Not if I can help it. I like my job and there are none similar in my immediate area. Moving into Metairie, regardless of the price of gas, would be cost prohibitive. Parochial schools are a must because the school district is one of the worst in the nation. Housing is more expensive (probably 30-50% higher). There are just too many mitigating factors besides the price of gas to consider. In the end, if I simply couldn't afford to drive to work, I don't know what I'd do. Probably get in a bread line with the rest of the city.
Mike
I hear people say that all the time. Do you have a source for that information or any example of a "bigwig" at an oil company also being a "bigwig" at an auto company?
I'm not trying to take up for oil companies here, but the question above is a good one. As I stated earlier, oil exploration is insanely expensive. Just food for thought: the researchers that run the title on the tracts of land an oil company is interested in leasing will cost about $600 per day, per person. This phase alone can take a year or more. The contact/negotiation phase costs the same and could take just as long, plus the actual cost of the lease. All of this and more is paid out each time they look at drilling property. This doesn't take into account the survey crews, equipment rental, seismic testing, etc, etc, etc.3) Why don't you ask your congressman how many dry wells they hit, how much money they lost in oil exploration to receive these "windfall profits" of a gallon of gas?
Sure, record profits for a big company is something easy to hate, but they put up the capital (risk) and they reap the reward.
Mike
Of course if you can keep making your salary go up, then you could be one of the winners. But on average, wages rise slower than prices during an inflationary period. In effect, inflation is a transfer of wealth.
Understood, I was just pointing out that the scenario of gasoline getting so expensive that I cannot afford to drive to work has a few holes in it.
Mike
Drilling in ANWR has gotta be some kind of ploy. I saw a piece done by National Geographic a few months ago about what's going on up there and what Bush is trying to do. At the end of the show, the narrator said that even if Bush gets the OK to drill there, with the amount of oil that is known to be there, it would only last ONE YEAR in this country. With that statement in mind, there's gotta be something else going on.
How could any body justify taking a chance with such a pristine environment for just one year's worth of oil?
I also saw a thing on MSNBC a couple of days ago where the commentator was saying that the oil companies have nothing to do with the price of oil as it is now...It's the oil TRADERS...I'd like to know more about that smoke and mirror deal. I also think the oil companies should be more accountable for windfall oil profits when everybody else is being squeezed. )-(
Gas prices haven't moved here in a long time. It's hitting the US more because oil is pegged to the USD for time being, and the value of the USD has gone down.
True to a point, but Scotch has stayed about the same.
...and all the while getting older and better.
Are you actualy insinuating that the amount of crude used by the US in a year is a small amount? That's a CRAPLOAD of crude!!!! - And it's not "known" to be there becasuse nobody has been allowed to even do any exploring in ANWR. It's just suspected to be there. Could be more. Could be less.
Are you reading this thread? Oil companies spend huge amounts of those "profits" in new exploration and production expenses. Do you understand what "profits" are?
+1
Not only do the profits go back into exploration, they also pay for salaries of a lot of employees, most of whom are American. Also the government gets 35%-40% off the top in corporate income taxes! Thats the REAL windfall profits of the Oil companies. I don't hear anyone whose complaining about the "windfall profits" of the oil companies offering to take that huge increase in government corporate tax revenue and give it back to individual middle class tax payers who are struggling with high energy costs.
Not completely true, Environmentalist regulators have prevented the development of Nuclear Power in the US (France gets almost 80% of it's electricity form Nuclear Power), Have prevented drilling in ANWR, and new sites in the Gulf or offshore in CA. The EPA requires 27 different blends of regular gasoline due to environmental regulations straining refining capacity, while environmentalist have prevented the permits for any new refineries to be built in the last forty years. So while the demand has increased environmentalist not only have decreased the US contribution to our own fuel supply they have also delayed or prevented the use of the most viable of the alternatives. You could make the case that they WANT the price of energy to be high. And in many cases they have declared as much. Ironically many of the same people who caused the problems are now complaining about it.
...and all those same things have been going on for 30 years. Yet gasoline prices didn't break the record high (was in 1980) until the last year.
There are a number of constraints on supply - but it is the massive increase in demand which is to blame for the current increased cost.
...and no amount of refineries, nuclear power, or domestic drilling is going to lower the price. Only a fundamental shift away from oil (and remember less than 50% of the oil in the US is used for fuel) will do that.
If it does, you will be one of a very few.
There IS going to be a sea change in American transportation patterns. Either we're going to come up with a real alternative fuel (and grain based ethanol definitely will never be it) or the "commute" as we know it is going to disappear.
Gas prices are never (other than local minima) going down.
Americans could save as much oil as is available (even given the best estimates) from ANWR by reducing our consumption by 10% for a single year.
In a sense your right, the demand everywhere has increased of late. But it's the artificial limitations on supply imposed on us by the regulators that have left us totally unprepared for the increase in demand. The rate of increase would have been much slower had we made a concerted switch to Nuclear power twenty or thirty years ago but instead we were letting Hollywood movies dictate our energy policy.
As far as a fundamental shift away from oil, thats exactly my point. How are you going to make a fundamental shift away from oil, when Nuclear power plants built on Long Island in the 80's were shut down due to overzealous government regulations, after billions of dollars of construction cost, and huge overruns due to the regulators changing the regulations countless times DURING the construction, AFTER the permits were granted? If you owned a power company would you waste your shareholders money planning to build another one? Nuclear would be great solution to the take the Oil we use producing electrical power and heat and put it into transportation.
It would also decrease the demand. But no sane power company manager would propose building a plant in todays regulatory environment. These environmental regulations are DIRECTLY responsible for the increase in demand. And many of the people advocating them WANT increased energy cost to slow down consumption. If the goal of a regulator is to increase the cost (not related to safety or the environment) you have a problem.
Can someone fill me in on how drilling in the US (ANWR, etc) will solve the oil crisis in the US? (I'm being serious, I really want to know)
Will the oil companies not sell it on the world market? It IS a capitalist economy. That's what's happening here in Canada. Our oil flows south. We have to buy it on the world market. Otherwise we'd have some pretty cheap gas as many other oil producing countries do.
Will the oil companies not sell it on the world market? It IS a capitalist economy. That's what's happening here in Canada. Our oil flows south. We have to buy it on the world market. Otherwise we'd have some pretty cheap gas as many other oil producing countries do.
Nice theory, the problem is our population, mostly form illegal immigration is growing at about 10% a year. Are you proposing that immigrants ride donkeys and live in thatched huts?
If ANWR is truly 10% of our oil consumption, (I've heard estimates from 5-10% of our current usage for about thirty years), that is huge. A 10% future increase in supply would have a huge effect on speculation. Remember a 2-3% estimated decrease ( natural disaster prediction like a hurricane) spikes the price of oil 5-10$ in one day!
Any significant increase in forecasted supply spikes the markets down the way a decrease in supply (the fear that oil platforms would be damaged in Katrina ;i.e.) spikes the markets up. The second thing it would do is signal the world that the US was once again serious about exploring every available source of energy, again signaling the markets that supplies in the future could be greater. The same thing would happen if we were to announce plans for multiple nuclear plants. Right now we have told the world, we have it, but we'd rather pay more for it from other places then go get it ourselves. So of course their yielding to our wishes and charging us more.
