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http://www.gaspricewatch.com/web_us_average_gas_price_chart.php?period=15year

http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/02/27/how-high-have-gas-prices-risen-over-the-years/

I'm going to play devil's advocate here : The way to debate this with republicans is simple : global warming is being used to massively expand government and regulation. It effectively regulates one of the few things nothing and nobody can do without : energy. I don't think anyone really denies that that is happening.

Which is also why this responsibility thing is so huge with them : they don't feel responsible for global warming. Their grandfather's grandfather had nothing to do with it, other than having kids (ie. you). It's 15-20 generations back that it got started, long before accurate family records even began, and once started it was (and is) just a feedback loop that will complete with or without humans (look at the models in the IPCC reports, and ignore your "you averaged highdimensional non-linear models to arrive at a conclusion ?" impulse, which any statistician should have. And btw, that is not the only alarm that goes off in my head looking at those studies. I agree that those models are the best currently possible way to predict climate. Agreed. How does that fact make them valid ? Our best may simply not be good enough).

In no reasonable sense of the word is anyone, nor humans "as a whole" responsible for global warming and there is zero moral justification to force people to take global warming into account. Were some humans part of the initial cause of global warming ? Yes, very likely. All the pain the entirety of the west put itself through in the last 15 years, btw, have been worse than useless.

Ok, but maybe we can justify it by pointing out the success we've had by all that interference and government expansion, right ? Otherwise all the people hurt because of this goal, from people starving due to bio-ethanol idiocy to the masses of people fired from no-longer-profitable factories in the west were hurt merely to make intellectuals feel good about themselves, with no measurable advantage. The only measure of importance in the models is worldwide co2 concentration, which has worsened due to government interference (e.g. because factories in the US by large run on nuclear and oil, whereas the chinese factories replacing them run on coal, producing about 20x more co2 for the same amount of energy).

So have we improvided global co2 production ? Nope, we've actually worsened it.

And of course, like all failing political goals, total failure can only be responded to in one way : we must do it again ! More ! Harder ! Which of course, to these sceptics, and to anyone observing the situation proves that the only goal of politicians is not to do do anything about global warming, but to amass more power and hurt more people, make everyone more dependent.

The result, of course, will be a complete crash followed by wars. But of course, we won't know that for sure until it really happens, and then everyone can say "I didn't know". You just did what was popular, right ? How can popular thinking be wrong ?

We're on the titanic, slaughtering working people to satisfy the almighty atheismo on the front deck, them screaming and we celebrating, celebrating how he has delivered us from icebergs ... say, what's that in the distance ?

There's a good explanation here a few months ago: http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/columns/rsquared

And here I expected a story about changes in the price of something over time would include a chart.

To remedy the lack of charts: http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/02/27/how-high-have-gas-prices-risen-over-the-years/

(This is a good link because it includes an inflation-adjusted chart.)

Greetings from Europe - with apologies to all decent people in the US, we kinda find it amusing to see you sliding back into your personal version of the dark ages.

You mean, like in Germany where they are saying goodbye to nuclear and cutting solar power subsidies?

... argues against it. This is why I am perpetually skeptical of all solar, wind, and tidal energy schemes: they inevitably and always elide crucial details about the economic availability of storage, or of the energy/dollar cost (the latter reflecting the former) of buildout, frequently demanding subsidy to bring them to parity with fossil fuel systems. Biofuels have even worse things to contend with, including biologic sequestration from competing species (expensive containment), and corresponding reduction in productivity that strains capable of living in open ponds.

I have stopped reading his blog because it is too depressing, but Robert Rapier is a very good source for this kind of material, and a good counterweight to the all-too-rosy scenarios coming out of academia and elsewhere. While he does not agree with me on everything (he has been a proponent of solar where I think it makes no sense at all), his comments on biofuels come from an area of expertise and go a long way to skewer much of the unsubstantiated talk in this area.

You are also pointing out exclusively imports. I would also just like to add to that the U.S. makes 42% of its own oil. So you COULD say that "most of our oil is from North America" and be pretty safe with that argument. 16% is from the Persian Gulf. See Source

eh? http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/01/25/top-10-sources-for-u-s-oil-for-2009/

You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 [e85prices.com] but you get 35% less mileage:

When subsidies are added E85 is more expensive.

you've made a fools bargain.

What was made was Corporatism which is what Benito Mussolini said Fascism should appropriately be called.

E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.

By the same token oil would be more expensive if it wasn't subsidized. Oil subsidized? Yes, oil is subsidized in the US.

Falcon

Actually ethanol doesn't eat up that much crude.

But it eats up tons of natural gas.

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2006/05/25/e85-spinning-our-wheels/

Also you're missing out on how Brazilians consume 6x less transportation fuel than the average American.
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2006/05/25/e85-spinning-our-wheels/

Sure, I buy the last part, I just don't get why light bulbs are unique.

Lightbulbs aren't unique. This isn't the only government policy that is directed at residential energy usage; there are many others, at both the federal and state levels.

So do absurdly large televisions. But nobody that I know of is proposing to mandate thermostats that won't heat/cool above/below certain government-prescribed threshholds, or force people to buy more reasonably sized TVs.

But that wouldn't be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs, anyway.

What would be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs would be, e.g., heating and cooling efficiency standards for heating and cooling units installed in new homes. Which Congress, in fact, established in 1992, long before the standards at issue on lightbulbs.

Or efficiency standards for televisions, which Congress authorized DOE to establish in 1989, and DOE has announced this year that they intend to establish and which would be effective in 2016.

Just because lightbulbs get talked about on Slashdot a lot doesn't mean they are somehow being treated different than everything else.

Sources:
Heating/cooling
TV

I'm interested to see what slashdotters have to say about this report, which says wind energy makes coal plants have to run intermittently rather than at steady state, which causes more pollution than just getting all the power from coal in the first place.

Parent makes a good point. We need infrastructure upgrades either way -- wind or nuclear. The thing is, conventional nuclear is here today, and mini nuclear is just about ready to go. Either has substantially better near-term carbon-reduction potential than anything else. Beyond the initial carbon savings that come directly from power manufacturing, given some grid investment and a surge in nuclear output, fully electric cars would actually be practical much sooner than is the case now.

If catastrophic, carbon-fueled global warming is seriously an imminent reality, I don't get why "...Environmentalists are not happy with the President's new trend" on mini-nuclear reactors (as this article asserts, anyway). If environmentalists were clamoring for nuclear power, I would probably believe that they believed catastrophic, carbon-fueled man-made global warming was real. As it stands, I can only think that those who actively oppose nuclear power don't really think so.