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It's up to you. Gas was getting cheaper. Why? Because we were all using less oil... because the economy was terrible. Every time you fill up your tank, remember that how much gas we buy affects the price you pay for a gallon of gas. The only way to keep the price down is to drive
less, and use less oil. When the gas we buy gets over $3.00, oil consumption drops like a rock. There's apparently a psychological threshold at $3.00 that stops us from driving. We need to reset that psychological threshold to $2.00! The price of gas has nothing to do with much of anything except speculation. Speculation is gambling. The speculators are just waiting for an opportunity to make more money by driving up the price of oil We all need to send them the message that we're not going to let them do it to us... by driving and flying less!
The economy going to hell wasn't a good thing. The price of oil going to ridiculous highs was partially responsible for how our economy looks today. Before oil prices went up, the US economy was headed for what they call a "soft landing." The greed behind the mortgage mess and the crooks on Wall Street had already written the next chapter in the history of our country. We were all just going along for the ride as things slowly got worse. When the Wall Street crooks couldn't make money off the mortgage disaster any more, they found a wonderful commodity to rip us off to an extent that the mortgage crooks could only dream of. Oil. We couldn't stop using oil, so they manipulated the market for oil to get the price well over $100 more a barrel than the oil was really worth. The cost of the oil manipulation is trillions of dollars to our economy... every one of us is paying for it. Even though Madoff stole billions, it's nothing compared to what the oil futures traders stole from us in cash money. Think it's not possible to manipulate the price of a commodity? Enron created the California electricity shortages by simply taking power plants off-line. They were so greedy, and they shut down them so often, that a lot of people started investigating what was going on. The answer was Enron was crooked. When are they going to catch the crooks that are manipulating the oil market? Eventually. When they do someone will take the fall for it, but we're all the ones who have been hurt by the crooks. What about the manipulations that brought gas to over $4.00 a gallon in the US? Prices couldn't go up fast enough for companies to continue making profits (except the shipping companies and airlines who put a fuel surcharge on everything they do). There was no way our economy could keep going with greed reaching into the pockets of every American citizen, and every American company. The giant house of cards came tumbling down within a few short weeks. The hoped for soft landing came so close to a depression that it was very scary. We're all worth less today, and anything we've saved for our retirement is worth half of what it was. Even with good credit, we might not be able to get a car or home loan. Our credit card interest has probably skyrocketed by 10 or 20%... and that's just because of greed - not because we're not paying on time. Sure, oil prices dropped... but they're still insanely high and going higher unless we all do something about it. The greedy refinery owners are still ripping us off. They were saying that the refineries were all at 100% capacity. If they see a mouse running around at one, they have to close it and bring in the hazmat teams - which drives up the price of oil. Did they build more refineries? No. Did the government make them build more refineries? No. The crooked politicians in Washington took money and favors from the oil companies through the oil company lobbyists (pretty much as blatant as Blagojevich trying to sell a Senate seat, but fine and dandy in Washington DC where ethics has a different meaning). A couple of years ago Washington mandated that all the diesel fuel sold for cars and trucks had to be low sulfur, which would reduce pollution. I don't think any of us can argue against reducing pollution, unless it extends the recession, or causes a depression in our country. The crooked refinery owners use that as an excuse today to keep the price of a gallon of diesel fuel obscenely high... higher than gasoline. How about gasoline prices? Because there is essentially no competition between the few refiners in the US, the price of gas and diesel doesn't have to track the refiners' cost of oil. Even if we use less oil and the refineries get down to 75% capacity, the refiners can simply decide how much money they want to make and create unbelievably greedy profit margins. They're purposely closing refineries to create a "shortage." The crooked refiners are keeping oil prices high... But if we use less oil, they'll eventually get the message that we're not going to let them continue to rip us off at the insanely high margins they got used to when the crude oil went to $150 a barrel. All you have to do is drive less than you did. Oil is sold under contracts in the commodities future market from month to month (like grain and pork, etc.). On the 20th of every month, the price of oil that the refineries use to base the price of gasoline changes. If last month's oil contract was for $70 a barrel, it magically will change on the 20th to maybe $80 (or $20 if there's a depression)... which means you'll see those gas station signs change (higher, in this case) within hours Even at these comparatively "low" oil prices, there are plenty of speculators gambling on oil. The prices don't truly reflect demand, but if we use less oil we're making it more painful for the speculators as well as the greedy oil producers and refiners. Russia, Venezuela and other oil producing countries are reeling from these low oil prices. In the last year they've increased spending in their countries until they need to get maybe $70 a barrel for crude oil just to break even (they were buying a lot of luxuries). Oil was $12 to $16 a barrel in the late 90's, and under $30 a barrel until 2003. If we use less oil, we won't need to buy it from the greediest producers. Somebody is going to be able to make money selling it at $30 a barrel. As a country, we can't afford to have diesel at high prices, since it affects everything we buy at every store we shop at - in person or online. This is our money! They've been stealing from us, and we've been letting them do it. The crooks that we elect and send to Washington aren't going to fix it for us. We have to fix it ourselves. I think we're all pretty happy when we see "how little" money it takes to fill up our tanks today. Gas seems pretty cheap now - after we've been ripped off by the Arabs and oil companies for so long. It's only cheap by comparison. If we accept $2.50 or $3.00 a gallon gas, we're letting the crooks steal from us. If you discount the hassles of taking your shoes and whatever off and standing in line at security, and being shoehorned into tiny seats (worse than cattle would be treated), jet aircraft use an incredible amount of oil to get people from point A to point B, although they do it quickly. The most efficient jet aircraft just spew jet fuel out the tailpipes of the engines (which is why airports don't smell great). The jet engines were first used for civilian aircraft when the price of a barrel of oil was very low, and a gallon of jet fuel (bought in bulk) was a fraction of a dollar (a gallon of regular gas was 31 cents in 1960). Modern jet aircraft are difficult to afford to fly at $70 a barrel for oil, and impossible to afford at $150 for a barrel of oil (even if they make us leave our bags at home, and fly naked to reduce the weight). Hmm, if we were all as skinny as 1960 Americans it might be affordable at $150 a barrel? Think about it before you start up your car, or book a flight. The best use of oil today is through common carriers:
To borrow a line from Smokey the Bear, "Only You Can Lower Oil Prices" If we let oil prices rise again, we're writing our own future... living like the third world. For the most part it doesn't make monetary sense to sell your gas or diesel powered car to buy a hybrid, unless your old car is worn out. If you need to buy a new car, something that gets 50mpg and is big enough to fit a normal sized human or three isn't a bad idea, but they are going to be expensive to get repaired (think thousands for some problems). If you can buy a lifetime bumper to bumper warranty with your electric car or hybrid, it will be well worth it if you plan on keeping it longer than the warranty period. Unfortunately most lifetime warranties aren't transferable to somebody else's life. What's coming in the fairly near future... the possible death of alternative energy. There's a serious side effect of driving less to use less oil, keeping the price of oil down. The many alternative energy companies who have popped up with some great ideas, including Ethanol producers, are going out of business. Most of the new technologies will require us to spend more than the equivalent of $2.00 for a gallon of gas, and most of us can't afford to spend any more than we have to. If a gallon of Ethanol costs $2.90 to produce, they will go out of business very quickly trying to sell that gallon for $2.00! There are many alternatives to oil powered cars: Natural Gas, LP Gas, Electricity, Hybrid, Hydrogen, Waste Oil, etc. Our biggest problem is that unless the whole country goes in a particular direction, the infrastructure won't be built so we can refuel these cars as needed - and we'll never buy them. When we switched from horses to gasoline at the turn of the last century, there was only one real choice. The infrastructure for electric and steam powered cars and trucks, which were OK alternatives, would never be able to match pumping gasoline out of drums all over the country. A simple and cheap infrastructure. The drums were above ground back then. There were no onerous EPA laws... there was no EPA. We've now got a lot of smart people working on the alternatives to using oil. There are so many choices, and so many more choices that will pop up in the next decade from all these smart people's research, that it's going to be difficult to impossible for any of these technologies to succeed without a huge infrastructure. There's no chance that any one of them will be able to build a national infrastructure without the government mandating one of the alternatives (like the digital TV change, where you don't have a choice). With the tough economy, the new administration's promise to tackle infrastructure projects to put people to work, and the auto manufacturers being bailed out by the government, this may be the right time for the government to mandate a change that will lead us away from oil for transportation. Whatever it is, it won't be perfect - just like digital TV or anything else the government will ever mandate. "Hybrid-Hybrid" electric cars are on the horizon, which can be charged from a regular outlet in your garage, go maybe 40 miles on batteries alone, and then a small engine would kick-in if you ran out of battery juice before you got home. Tesla is already selling an all electric $100,000 or so car that goes really fast for an average of 200 miles on a charge (usually a couple of months to order one). I don't know what you do if you drive 150 miles somewhere, and then can't get home. Without the infrastructure, it's a rich man's toy.
Like many of the small European cars you used to see on the streets in the US, sales of the Citicar were killed when the manufacturer couldn't/wouldn't meet Washington's expensive mandated safety standards. High mpg economy cars are still being sold all over the world without the expensive US mandated safety stuff, and most of the owners are still alive and their wallets are fatter because they didn't have to spend the money on our safety mandates. Safety and pollution standards have killed innovation in the auto industry, most of which would come from smaller companies led by technical visionaries. Only really large companies can afford the government mandates (and the government gave billions to the big carmakers!). These government mandates exclude smaller companies from coming out with reasonably priced automobiles... either gas or alternative energy. The costs for developing and installing crash bumpers (that don't seem to do much), the air bags (do we really need 6 air bags in a car?), unbelievably uncomfortable seat and shoulder belts, and pollution controls (including really expensive catalytic converters that contain platinum) are higher than a start-up company can handle. For living in a "free country,"
there sure are a lot of laws that tell us what we have to do to stay
safe (that don't do much These aren't Henry Ford's cars any more! If battery technology improves, electric cars and Hybrid-Hybrids could become commonplace. If you're geeky, you can read an article on the next technology of batteries that could power an electric car - a battery that's actually a capacitor from a company called EEStor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor The EEStor battery seems to be untested in the real world, but in laboratory testing it had no memory effect, didn't lose charge while it wasn't used, and was cycled to full charge and drained a million times without losing capacity (no comparison to modern Lithium Ion batteries used in electric cars today). There may be some products using it in 2011? If you're really geeky, you can see the actual patent at: http://theeestory.com/files/ESSTOR_US07466536B1.pdf What's the next greed we're all going to have to deal with? Healthcare. The healthcare legislation is only going to make the healthcare companies richer, and the rest of us poorer. For some reason, politicians singled out the health insurance companies in their legislation. That doesn't make sense, since the health insurance companies just have to pay the bills from the greedy healthcare professionals, greedy healthcare equipment makers, greedy hospitals, and everybody else who makes unbelievable profits off those of us who get sick (or have babies!). We have the same (or fatter?) bodies as we had in 1950 or 1970, but we're paying LOTS more for healthcare than we did then... and that's not including the MRIs and drugs that weren't available back then. We're all paying big bucks to line the pockets of the greedy healthcare industry. Many of us are spending more on healthcare than we ever were on gas for our car... even when gas was close to $5.00 a gallon. Health insurance at our company averages $650 per person, with a male at 55+ running at $1200+ a month, and a female at 55+ running $1600+ a month for a PPO (HMOs can kill you). Some prescription drugs can cost $10 to $20 a pill, or more. There's certainly a lot of greed in the medical industry.
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