gas prices ...

[dorian gray]

bwahahahaha

 

[Reign in Acai]

Earlier this week some economist/energy analyst types stood before congress and flat out said that there is absolutely no reason why a barrel of oil should be priced as it is. You have these camel humping (pun intended) ragheads upping the ante in oil output, yet there is no budge at the pump. Well these suits pretty much stated that the rise in the market value of oil is primarily due to the index speculators who are beefing up their portfolios to Krigloch sized proportions (his nuts that is). If a barrel of Texas tea was solely based on supply and demand a barrel would be going for roughly $60-$70 roubles. They went on to say that this turn around would take no less than 30 days, which in turn would drop a gallon of US Grade A 87 to roughly $2. The problem in obtaining this goal is how to go about tightening the chain around these index speculating scumbags throats. One way is to up the paltry margin payment needed in purchasing oil contracts. Another way is isolating a certain demographic of investors who also hold shares in other commodities. Any way you want to slice it, we're getting fucked by extremist capitalism, and the solution is merely a couple of congressional knob turns away. Too bad special interest is sodomizing the House and the Senate eh?!?!

 

[dorian gray]

I read this recently too.
Jerry, how about running for office?

 

[skeptik]

$3.87

 

[lurch70]

still hovering at around $4.50 here

 

[skeptik]

You know shit's fucked up when you're bragging that you don't quite pay $4 per gallon yet.

 

[lurch70]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/06/27/germany.gas.ap/index.html

 

[Thanatopsis123]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/06/27/germany.gas.ap/index.html

"$9.40 per gallon" Holy shit.

 

[dorian gray]

euro 1.55 = $9.40? WTF?
The exchange rates shot through the roof while I wasn't paying attention.

 

[lurch70]

price was per liter ... then X'ed into gallons

 

[Conspicuously Absent]

price was per liter ... then X'ed into gallons

canada has always paid about twice as much per gallon as you guys, unless we cross the border. Which many vancouverites do, especially now, since our dollar is more on par with yours... which makes the difference in gas prices even greater.

And europe has always paid more.

 

[Krigloch the Furious]

european gas tax ftw!

 

[Krilons Resa]

[ame]http://youtube.com/watch?v=UOpcPfAarjY[/ame]

 

[Krigloch the Furious]

drill, drill, drill, drill, drill!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[lurch70]

10 good things about $4 gas

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1819594_1819592,00.html

I became guily of one ... watching my mpg readout religiously. its become part of my driving now ... not sure if I like it or hate it. it is beginning to make a more "smoother" driver as I have a serious lead foot.

 

[dorian gray]

I had a recent tank at 23.4 mpg on my Ranger thats rated for 14/19 EPA - based purely on a change of driving habits

 

[cthulufhtagn]

drill, drill, drill, drill, drill!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

no no no no no dude. no.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN2934033020080429?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true
ANALYSIS-Bush drilling plan wouldn't have eased pump prices
By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) - The Bush administration says the United States would be less addicted to foreign oil and fuel prices would be lower if Congress had only opened up Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

But that claim doesn't reflect the long lead time to develop the refuge's huge oil reserves, which would not be available for several more years and initial volumes would still be small if Congress in 2002 had approved the administration's plan to drill in ANWR, energy experts say.

President George W. Bush during his first year in office made giving energy companies access to the estimated 10 billion barrels of crude in the refuge the centerpiece of his national energy policy that sprouted from Vice President Dick Cheney's controversial and secretive energy task force.

With gasoline prices soaring to records in recent weeks, Bush has stepped up his argument that ANWR oil is a solution.

"We should have been exploring for oil and gas in ANWR," he said last week when asked about record pump costs. "But, no, we made the decision and our Congress kept preventing us from opening up new areas to explore in environmentally friendly ways and now we're becoming, as a result, more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil."

Congress has tried several times in Bush's two terms to pass legislation to finally open the refuge to energy exploration, but always fell a few votes short due in part to concern over what drilling would do to ANWR's wildlife.

"They've repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in ANWR," Bush complained to reporters on Tuesday at a Rose Garden press conference. He said oil supplies from the refuge "would likely mean lower gas prices."

The Energy Information Administration, which is the Energy Department's independent analytical arm, estimated that if Congress had cleared Bush's ANWR drilling plan the oil would have been available to refiners in 2011, but only at a small volume of 40,000 barrels a day -- a drop in the bucket compared with the 20.6 million barrels the U.S. consumes daily.

At peak production, ANWR could have potentially added 780,000 barrels a day to U.S. crude oil output by 2020, according to the EIA.

The extra supplies would have cut dependence on foreign oil, but only slightly. With ANWR crude, imports would have met 60 percent of U.S. oil demand in 2020, down from 62 percent without the refuge's supplies.

All three leading presidential candidates, Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain, are against oil drilling in the refuge.

The administration says if Congress had acted sooner, U.S. drivers would be getting relief at the pump from the extra oil supplies in the market.

"Opening up ANWR is not long term," Bush said Tuesday.

But both government and private energy experts say Bush is overly optimistic that ANWR oil would be flowing now if Congress had approved his drilling plan back in 2002, because of the years needed to find the crude and develop the fields.

"I would say under the best of circumstances it would take approximately 10 years" for any ANWR oil to make it into the market, said Philip Budzik, an EIA analyst.

"Even if oil was flowing, it would be too small amount to reduce the price" of crude or gasoline, said Daniel Weiss, energy expert at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington.

"President Bush's claim ignores the primary causes behind record high oil prices: a cheap dollar, high demand from China and India, and speculators driving the price up. Drilling and sullying the Arctic would not address any of these causes of high oil prices," said Weiss.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel disputed Bush has implied ANWR oil would be available today if his drilling plan was approved in 2002. "He didn't say my 2002 vote," Stanzel said. However, he could not clarify whose drilling plan the president was talking about.

Gerald Kepes, head of the upstream oil and gas practice at the PFC Energy consulting group, said if the Interior Department had begun leasing tracts in ANWR in 2003 the first oil would had probably been flowing in 2012.

"This all assumes that there would be no environmental challenges," said Kepes, as lawsuits to block drilling could take years to resolve. "Really, 2015 is more then likely."

Opening ANWR could have made current prices worse because Saudi Arabia may have delayed increasing its oil production capacity, making world supplies tighter and prices higher.

"Since there is a worldwide market for oil, increases in production in one place (like ANWR) could be offset by decreases in production someplace else to keep the prices high," CAP's Weiss said. (Reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by Marguerita Choy)



http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/jun/16/unraveling-myths-about-anwr-drilling-it-just/

Unraveling myths about ANWR drilling: It just won't work

By Russell A. Burgos
Monday, June 16, 2008


I paid $85 for gas recently, and though my neighbor across the island pumped nearly double that into her Suburban, it still hurt.

To ease the pain, I punched up Hannity and Hewitt on the radio and both men were demanding — as Rep. Elton Gallegly has in The Star — that we solve our problem by drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

This is controversial, especially concerning the ecologically sensitive Area 1002. It's ironic, too, since conservatives routinely promote "the market" as the be-all, end-all for social problems, yet, here they're demanding government intervention in a market just because they don't like the way it works these days.

But since I'm all for solving our gasoline problem, I looked into ANWR, reading nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reports and the official 2007 assessment produced by the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy at the specific request of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Turns out ANWR's a bit of a myth.

The first myth about ANWR is that we can solve today's oil problem by drilling there.

But the government says that, even under best-case scenarios, it would take 10 years to start production and the average net drop in price would be about 86 cents per barrel — 0.6 percent.

The second myth about ANWR is that drilling there would provide us with "energy independence."

But the government's most optimistic estimate is that peak ANWR production would be less than 1 percent of total world oil output — about 750,000 barrels per day in a country that consumes 19 million barrels per day.

In fact, the government admits that foreign-oil dependence would decrease only slightly, between the years 2022 and 2026, and would then return to pre-ANWR levels.

The third myth about ANWR is that drilling would produce a "supply effect" on gasoline prices. In that Economics 101 formulation, as oil supply increases, gasoline prices will drop.

But the government throws cold water on that myth, too, because "OPEC and other producers may cut output to offset the supply effect." In other words, OPEC won't sit still as we force price reductions — they'll match our production increases with production decreases to keep supply steady and prices high.

The fourth myth about ANWR is that we "know" there's an awful lot of oil just waiting to be pumped there.

But the government admits that "there is much uncertainty" about ANWR and "little direct knowledge" about the location of oil, how easily it can be recovered, the size of the fields and the quality of oil in them. What we "know" is little more than a guess, based upon some hypothetical, exploratory models.

The fifth myth about ANWR is that so-called "limited-footprint" technologies would minimize environmental harm.

But the government admits limited-footprint technology probably won't work and "full development of the 1002 area" would require infrastructure throughout the area.

And the government openly acknowledges the threat to what it calls "the most biologically productive part of the Arctic Refuge for wildlife," "the center of wildlife activity," and the only federal land that "protects, in an undisturbed condition, a complete spectrum of the arctic ecosystem in North America."

At the end of the day, ANWR simply doesn't live up to the mythology. It certainly doesn't seem worth the cost. So it seems the only real relief will come from the dreaded "nanny state" remedies — higher corporate average fuel efficiency standards, smaller cars, fuel conservation and slower driving speeds.

Under its own best-case scenario, the government admits that drilling in ANWR would produce a pitifully tiny effect on foreign-oil dependency — four short years of relief at most — and a trivial effect on gas prices.

And even then, it'd be 10 years before that Suburban and I felt a penny's worth of relief at the gas pump.

— Russell A. Burgos of Thousand Oaks teaches global studies at UCLA.

 

[lurch70]

I had a recent tank at 23.4 mpg on my Ranger thats rated for 14/19 EPA - based purely on a change of driving habits

that is pretty damn good ...

i've been coasting a lot more recently. very aware of light changes from a distance and coasting to them. Also trying not to flutter the throttle too much the times I can't use cruise control.

so far I am using one less tank of gas a month then the Mazda which saves me about $65 a month, $780/year.

 

[dorian gray]

nicely done!

I had to do all kinds of annoying techniques like putting it in neutral on dowhills, driving annoyingly slow, turning off the engine at stops, and accelerating as lightly as possible.
I did the same with the Subaru recently and watched with amazement as I cracked the 30 mpg barrier.

Check out gassavers.org

 

[Chromatose]

In the past few weeks I:

-replaced my dirty, clogged air filter
-Got an oil change, and in the process was told the oil was burning and gunked up since I forget cars need oil changes, so had that all flushed out.
-Started driving the speed limit.
-Coast when possible.

and my mpg went from around 25 to 24 in my Honda Civic. wtf! I'm not gonna stop using my air conditioner though, pshaw.

I've just been having to find my mileage by calculating the miles with amount I put in at fillup, and I hear that's not too accurate without doing averages of several fillups, so WE SHALL SEE.

Unfortunately I likely spend a large portion of my driving time at red lights, so I'm sure that has a big impact. And the red lights around here can last for minutes on end.