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Americans Rejoice At Lower Gas Prices
HughPickens.com writes Drivers across America are rejoicing at falling gasoline prices as pumps across the country dip below $3 a gallon. According to Sharon E. Burke while it's nice to get the break at the gas pump and the economic benefits of an energy boom at home, the national security price of oil remains high and the United States should be doing everything it can to diversify global energy suppliers. Ultimately, the only way to solve our long term energy problem is to make a sustained, long-term investment in the alternatives to petroleum. But October saw a 52 percent jump in Jeep SUV sales and a 36 percent rise in Ram trucks while some hybrid and electric vehicle sales fell at the same time. "This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," says Anthony Perl. "Some people might have the willpower to stick with their program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before committing to a diet—but if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty traumatic."
Nicholas St. Fleur writes at The Atlantic that low oil prices may also undermine the message from the UN's climate panel. The price drop comes after the UN declared earlier this week that fossil fuel emissions must drop to zero by the end of the century in order to keep global temperatures in check. "I don't think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today," says Perl. Falling oil prices may also deter businesses from switching to energy-saving technology, as a 2006 study in the Energy Journal suggested. Saving several pennies at the pump, Perl says, may tempt Americans away from actions that can lead to a sustainable, post-carbon future.
Nicholas St. Fleur writes at The Atlantic that low oil prices may also undermine the message from the UN's climate panel. The price drop comes after the UN declared earlier this week that fossil fuel emissions must drop to zero by the end of the century in order to keep global temperatures in check. "I don't think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today," says Perl. Falling oil prices may also deter businesses from switching to energy-saving technology, as a 2006 study in the Energy Journal suggested. Saving several pennies at the pump, Perl says, may tempt Americans away from actions that can lead to a sustainable, post-carbon future.
The jeep stats are way out to lunch and have nothing to do with low price of gas. Jeep has been the start of FCA for quite some time now, not just recently.
"This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," says Anthony Perl. "Some people might have the willpower to stick with their program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before committing to a diet—but if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty traumatic."
Uh...unable to control their "willpower" when buying a car? We now blame Jeeps and SUVs for this horrible affliction? The additional $10 - $15K you'll spend on a larger offroad capable vehicle isn't enough of a deterrent? Fucking seriously? Do you people also "buy" your cars at the casino?
Willpower in car buying...whatever the hell that shit is supposed to mean. I assume that during the next fuel spike we'll see insurance companies start accepting claims for this horrible "disease" like we did with alcohol, right? I mean, an addiction to large overpriced SUVs that never touch dirt or mud is clearly an addiction spiraling out of control that we should probably earmark billions in taxpayer money. After all, someone should think of the children, especially while the oil sheiks take a personal jet to go get their Big Mac...
I miss the good ole' days when Slashdot was about technology, not navel-gazing bullshit about American politics and policy. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And about 90% of the difference is additional taxes that your government has placed on the substance -- so if you don't like it, whine to Parliament. :P
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The world has gotten a bailout due to trillions spent on military forced stabilization.
I for one am boggled why some think they can change human nature. We consume. Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
You people really think this is a coincidence, or about 'supply and demand'? How many times you gonna buy that bridge?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Unfortunately it also punishes the economy. It's a democratic republic so if you go to pissing off the electorate there will be a backlash. The Democratic party just rediscovered this effect recently.
The middle east has the lowest overhead for oil production. If they decide to bottom out prices the wells in the US get capped again.
Recently I tried the BBC Fuel Price Calculator, which for where I am at $2.55/Gallon indicates that the only place I can get gas cheaper is either Nigeria or Venezuela.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
In UK, the gas taxes pay for the roads. In the USA, gas taxes cover less than half, with the rest coming out of general taxes. And the US has about four times the length of road per capita than the UK does. It is not that UK gas taxes are low, it is that US separates tax source from target to avoid discouraging driving. Remember, what's good for GM is good for America.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Where petrol costs ~£4.60 per US gallon =~ $7.30. About 60% of that price is tax, take away that tax you get about $3.
I do not like expensive petrol, but I do realise that we need to cut the amount of carbon based energy that we use - climate change might not affect me, but it will my kids.
With a policy like that in place, there won't be an economy left to worry about within a few years. The ultimate payer of ALL taxes is the individual; $7 per gallon charged to a business will be computed into costs of products and passed on to the purchasers of such products. The weight of such insane taxation would be colossal. Sounds like you want people to make rafts and abandon the country.
No one claimed it was free - we claimed it was 4 times cheaper than yours.
I really don't think anybody needs people like you lecturing us on our travel habits. Instead, maybe you should focus on the corruption in these markets and how they fix prices, and demand better machines that cause less damage.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Saudis are bottoming-out the price of oil to punish marginal north American oil producers, and the Russians
Partly. But their main target is Iran. Iran is hurting under the sanctions, and is under a lot of economic pressure to cut a deal on their uranium enrichment. The oil price drop is turning up the pressure big time. Nobody fears a nuclear Iran more than the Saudis, not even the Israelis.
If Iran reaches an agreement with the P5+1 on uranium, then expect the price of oil to rebound quickly as the Saudis shut off the spigot.
In UK, the gas taxes pay for the roads. In the USA, gas taxes cover less than half, with the rest coming out of general taxes. And the US has about four times the length of road per capita than the UK does. It is not that UK gas taxes are low, it is that US separates tax source from target to avoid discouraging driving. Remember, what's good for GM is good for America.
No, in the UK, the petrol taxes go into a large pool of money called the treasury, which is used to fund all the things the country does. This is true of pretty much all national taxes. The same is notably true of "Vehicle Excise Duty" (note, *not* road tax), which contrary to popular belief, does not give you more right to use a road than someone who hasn't paid VED, nor does it mean that you have "paid for the road".
You realise that this is pretty much exactly the policy that most of the prosperous areas of Europe use, right? This is why US fuel costs about 2/5 of what UK/French/German fuel costs.
It's a seller's market.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
7$/gallon would have a huge effect but it wouldn't be the end of civilization. Germany has gas that costs more than 7$/gallon and people haven't started making rafts yet here.
Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
Paying attention to Jeep and Ram sales doesn't really say a whole lot. Jeep has the largest number of smaller - yet non-toy - SUVs of any manufacturer right now; some of the other manufacturers have been reducing their line-ups. Similarly while the Ram trucks haven't changed much in the past decade the other manufacturers are changing their trucks which shifts demand around.
You need to look at industry-wide sales stats to have a sense of what the sales numbers are doing. You need to also look at it against annual averages, as a sales uptick in the fall is not unusual when businesses are looking to finish their fiscal years.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Prosperous in what ways? What are the positive and negative aspects of this policy? Do you have any sources available for that information that you can share?
Maybe in California. We're a little less exuberant on the East coast.
2 minor nits.
1. Hummers are no long being made.
2. Most F-150s are sold as work trucks. Also, F-150 is one of the more efficient work trucks out there.
"This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," says Anthony Perl.
Should Big Macs cost more to dissuade their use? What about the people who couldn't afford better than a Big Mac? Switching away from the analogy: inexpensive energy is the biggest benefit to poorer members of society. It means cheaper food, cheaper heating/cooling, cheaper transportation. When someone says "make energy source X cost more than energy Y because Y needs a chance to succeed", they're not thinking about all the costs associated with the rise in energy costs.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is. If I want to visit an area with a lot of large shops and restaurants, I'm looking at a 30-mile drive at a minimum; 40 miles if I want to go somewhere that actually has American corporate icons like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, Best Buy, etc. Taxing fuel at such an astronomical rate will certainly lower the amount of fuel use, but how many businesses will have to shut down because customers can't afford to blow $14 on fuel that they weren't spending before just to patronize those businesses? How much will the cost of items on eBay, Amazon, and other e-commerce sites increase? Someone who lives 30 miles from work because they can't afford housing any closer than that could be paying an extra $70 or more a week in fuel costs just to get to and from their jobs. The worst part is that people who would be considered "poor" are the hardest hit by this sort of feel-good taxation. In a country with a dismal record of low economic upward mobility, the last thing we need is to punch everyone in the financial face while they're already struggling to move up the ladder at all.
How about the effects of such a tax on, say, diesel fuel for the carriers to bring stuff from west coast ports to this side of the country. None of this deals with the serious problems we have in this country with rampant abuse of tax money. $7 per gallon worth of fuel tax that the corrupt politicians get to freely play around with? No thank you. Perhaps if our election cycles were not so widely spaced out so that we could throw the bums out faster, it'd be different.
According to most economists people are going to stop driving and wait for gas prices to get even cheaper.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Not inaccessibly. I lean towards libertarianism and believe in global warming.
The answer is to cut the tax rate and impose a carbon tax. If structured correctly, the average individual wouldn't pay higher taxes. Unless, that is, they decided that they should start conserving energy.
What the article fails to address is that the Saudis have flooded the market with cheap oil that they can make money on at 30 dollars a barrel while tar sands require about 93 dollars a barrel and fraccing requires about 83 dollars a barrel to remain viable. These groups have already cut back and started layoffs.
> Perhaps all the morons buying hummers and F-150s
Wven the four-door SuperCab version of the F-150 gets real- world 23.5 in road tests. Do you have a more efficient way to haul things, or are you spouting off without having any idea what you're talking about?
You can base your opinions on facts, or you can base them on what a Comedy Central comedian tells you to think. Your choice.
You act as if the only people who will end up paying taxes are low income Americans. Yes, eventually all taxes are paid by individuals but some of them are foreign investors, and some of them are rich people who will not decrease their consumption just because of a little more tax. Besides this, a tax on petroleum specifically will reduce the money we send to our friends in the Middle East for their oil.
You can shape the economy based on who you tax -- the more tax burden on the rich, the less investment, while the more tax burden on the poor, the less consumption. Besides this, it also affects the production of rich kid toys, vs basic necessities. And the level of unrest. And a whole bunch of other factors.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
1) The Jevons paradox comes to mind.
2) I still believe population is generally the key factor. Although it will never happen, without population control the hole in the bottom of the energy bucket will just keep getting wider and wider.
Our (Denmark) gas price is somewhere along the lines of DKR 11/L (DKR 6.23 = $1) so $1.77/L ~ $6.68/gallon (3.78541 L = 1 US gallon). Very few of us are on rafts. High taxation as a cause of the fall of civilization is a myth.
... whatever
Every time you fill your gas, please write a check for twice as much and make it payable to the U.S. Treasury. Until you are willing to put your money where your mouth is, shut up.
It coincides with the event of a major country, that is almost completely dependent on oil exports for its economy, invading part of Europe.
This may or may not be a coincidence. At any rate, this is very bad news for the Russian economy. It remains to be seen if Putin can generate a strong enough RDF to keep the Russian people in line with his foreign policy.
I stand corrected. However, does gas tax and VED revenue match or exceed road construction and maintenance expenditure in the UK?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
SoCal doesn't automatically extrapolate out to the entire United States of America. California is the only state with its own set of special emissions requirements for vehicles that force manufacturers to produce "California models" of everything they sell there. If that study is methodologically sound and built on solid premises (I lack the time or motivation to review it right now), sure, find a way to get SoCal residents to stop killing themselves, but keep laws meant to deal with SoCal issues away from my coast.
Initially I applauded to US mandating manufacturers must meet fleet average mileage or face penalties. My opinion was that yes, it would make cars marginally more expensive and would move us toward energy independence. Well, I was wrong.
Drilling end up moving us toward energy independence, all gains we had in fuel economy (not an insubstantial amount) are dwarfed by increase in oil and gas production. At the same time, cars did not end up more expensive. Instead manufacturers made a decision to compromise reliability. Questionable technologies like CVT and direct injection, and mis-application of turbocharging made modern cars significantly less reliable than what was produced just 10 years ago. So we end up with marginal fuel economy savings and major energy loss due to additional manufacturing and recycling of cars that no longer last as long.
Here is a map of the countries that subsidize fossil fuels:
http://www.iea.org/subsidy/index.html
They tend to be oil-producing countries with otherwise-weak economies.
Prices determine resource allocation. If you increase gasoline taxes, you discourage gasoline use. This has a variety of ripple effects, including to increase the value of urban relative to suburban real estate (and increase urban rents), and encourage investment in wind, solar, etc. There are winners and losers.
(I believe we should increase fossil fuel taxes; it's the textbook way to price in externalities. It is exactly what a free-market approach to the environment looks like.)
Something people forget.. SNOW - the number one reason people buy Jeeps and trucks in fall is to prepare for winter snow and ice. Has been this way since I was a kid.
4x4 Jeeps are generally seen everywhere in winter where I live, and Ram trucks generally are used as cheap snow plow trucks for small mom/pop mini self start companies.
Also both vehicles with tow packages can be used to haul a trailer full of snow machines / snow blowers too.
Soo perhaps less looking for quick reason, and more look to historical buying patterns.
You mean, the ones that are back into a recession with no sign of how they're ever going to get out?
It's good to see and a definite short term benefit will be realized. Lord knows it cuts down on our commute cost. I think one thing that would need to be addressed is the absolute need for most families in rural areas to have more than 1 vehicle.
I live in small-town Minnesota and I don't know any family that only has 1 vehicle. I think the only way we could do this is to really push a paradigm shift to where companies push more for moving their work-force home where possible. This has been done somewhat, but, we see many companies moving their workforce back to the office too. Frankly, I feel office-work is economically a bad choice, ecologically irresponsible, & doesn't foster work-life balance.
Granted, this won't be a home-run as far as reduction... but, every bit helps!
Your point is certainly correct. Almost everything you buy, from food to medicine, to clothing is carried in trucks, so high gas taxes increase the cost of all goods. A minor nitpick:
> What about the people who couldn't afford better than a Big Mac?
A Big Mac costs $4 and weighs half a pound, so it's $8 per pound. Fruits and vegetables run about $1 per pound. Junk food is expensive, so the oft-expressed claim that Americans eat junk because they can't afford nutritious food is silly. Our neighbors to the south, in Mexico, spend $1 / day for more nutritious food that many of us spend $10 / day on. Many healthy foods are less than 50 cents per pound, including rice, beans, and bananas. I just spent 99 cents on a loaf of whole wheat bread. A single Hershey bar or orser of fries would cost more.
The entire point of the article is that lower gas prices are going to put the breaks on a massive energy tech boom. To coin another /. meme, rtfs (read the _fine_ summary) :P
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I never said that low income Americans are the only people who end up being taxed. I said that individuals are the only people who end up paying taxes because all taxes charged to companies and other entities that individuals must make purchases from will ultimately be rolled into the final cost to those individuals at the grocery store checkout or on the plumber's service invoice. What I said is that low income Americans end up being the hardest hit. Let me clarify that statement: for the same base level of consumption required to maintain the existence of a person or family (a base level which ALL people participating in the economy must consume to meet basic human needs, not just poor people) the added taxation represents a disproportionately larger percentage of each paycheck. If you make $300 a week in take-home pay and you have to drive 30 minutes each way to work in a 30 MPG vehicle with a $7 per gallon fuel tax and $3 per gallon pre-tax fuel cost, you're spending $100 per week (33.333% of your entire paycheck) to get to your job and back. Contrast this with the $3 per gallon amount of $30 per week (10% of your entire paycheck) and the difference is clear.
Sure, you may object to the example I'm using. Here are a couple of possible objections and their answers. "Why would you work that far away?" Sometimes you don't have enough local jobs. "Why not move closer to work?" What, and pay the extra $280 a month in rent instead of fuel? Who'll pay the moving costs and the security deposit if the person is already practically broke?
I could think of more but I think you get my general point by now.
our entire society is based on cheap gas. If you could put the tax money into public transportation and housing for the middle class and poor that'd be one thing. But you might find it easier to give everyone magic zero-emissions flying carpets than that. The public health benefits will be immediately lost when we all ratchet up our work weeks to 80 to pay for gas.
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I bought a Jeep Patriot three years ago after selling my 10 year old sedan and three huge selling points for me where:
1) the new design of the Jeep line-up
2) the improved gas mileage from my sedan
3) the increased cargo capacity
Not only do many of the Jeeps have good gas mileage, they also have the new Cherokee out right now. The statistics in the summary seem cherry picked for the story and make it looks like people are choosing vehicles that get 10 miles per gallon.
I have several relatives in construction that have just this past year found steady work and upgraded their work trucks to Rams, again because the Rams get better mileage from their existing trucks.
The premises are completely flawed.
Yes, it's true. We are currently producing more oil than Saudi Arabia! But we are far from being independent.
We need to do several things to be truly energy independent:
1. Set standards on gasoline, there are way too many formulas that vary state to state
2. Determine how many refineries we need (haven't built any new refineries for 30+ years).
3. Determine the best locations for the refineries (logistics of incoming raw crude and outgoing fuels)
4. Free up government land for oil drilling and fracking
5. Build pipelines to transport oil cheaply (XL Pipeline needs to happen, Canada is a huge ally and trust worthy)
6. Stop the Greens agenda, the Caribou won't be bothered by oil drilling in Alaska, that's just silly (saw video, hundreds of square miles of nothing but tundra)
6a. Hey, Caribou tastes real good and it's fully of Omega 3's and low in fat. Setup a nomadic ranch herding permit system and let's start selling MacBou Burgers!
7. Oil and Energy Independence needs to be considered a matter of National Security and as such should trump saving the Spotted Squirrel or any other endangered species that really wouldn't be impacted in reality!
There is no reason we shouldn't be paying $1.25 per gallon for gasoline. Don't give me that electric car bullshit either. You're charging you car using energy from coal so you ain't doing any favors using a toy battery car. Also those batteries are bad for the environment and will have to be recycled properly and that's expensive. Build more nuclear power plants. Wind and Solar don't work, at least not at the scale we really need not to mention they both kill birds! We have lots and lots of oil and coal and natural gas resources. More than we ever thought we had years ago. There are even more resources under the polar caps. There is no shortage and there won't be for hundreds of years. By then we should have figured out fusion and then the problems are truly solved.
yeah your enemies are selling you cheap oil to fuck you up!
oh wait.. what?
just take it and stockpile it, like you're doing with all the merchandise from china.
anyhow, where the fuck are all the peak oil theorists now?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So people make long term purchase decisions (like a new car) based on short term metrics (the price of gas right now.) No one ever thinks that maybe the price of gas will go back up before they are finished paying off the car? It is almost like fossil fuels are a finite resource and that gas prices may go up and and down in the short term but will always keep going up in the long term unless or until we find some other way to meet our energy needs. Sometimes may faith in humanity tends to waiver. OTOH if you want a fuel efficient car now would be the time to get it. I promise the price of gas will go back up before you are finished paying it off. I would wait until gas prices go back up to get that gas guzzler though.
If by "flooded" you mean "failed to artificially restrict" then, yes. It's interesting in that the oil producing nations have, at times, been able to collectively meter their output to keep the money flowing in. Of course, at $100 a bbl there's no need to cut back, and several states are strapped for cash so they're less interested in putting the screws to the non-oil producing nations as they are putting cash in their pockets, rockets in their launchers, and food on the table. As a result, the market is floating as it would in a normal competitive marketplace.
Actually, if the US really wanted lower gas prices all the congress would have to do is forbid the export of oil products (or tax it at a significantly high rate), keeping the domestic supply here. The US is the world's largest exporter of refined oil products (diesel and gasoline chief among them) - we pay high prices at the pump because we ship so much to other countries, who are willing to pay for it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Check a map.
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The UK road system is subsidised by general taxation, ie. gas tax + road tax + VED + VAT on vehicles sales < cost of UK road network.
It depends a bit what you count as the road network: just the national highway system, or highways plus major roads, do you include roads paid for by local authorities etc. etc.
That's like arguing that we should just accept obesity as human nature, and figure out how to adapt to it.
Climate change is impossible to stop now, but at least we can try to limit the damage AND improve our quality of life in the process. Consuming fossil fuels aggravates my allergies. It makes me spend more time cleaning. I'd rather have clean energy.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Won't fly.
It is a free country and high fuel taxes will take away your freedom of movement. Surely the US supreme court will support this when the democrats sue after the republican congress raises fuel taxes to save the environment.
Nice try
To those who want a standing army of over 4 million active service and support staff rather than a domestic defense force, please get out your checkbooks and send your portion of the 1.2 Trillion Dollars we spend on the military every year. I, personally, think we should be able to defend the 4M sq miles of land we have with the same money that Russia spends on its 7M square miles. And that means those few who want all that extra military need to cough up the 90% of that 1.2 Trillion that we're over spending.
When that happens, I'll have the money chip in a few extra bucks a gallon at the pump for better roads, bridges, public transportation subsidies, and the like.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In UK, the gas taxes pay for the roads.
Do they cover all the road costs?
In the USA, gas taxes cover less than half, with the rest coming out of general taxes.
Correct, depending on the type of road. The interstate highway system is paid for out of gas taxes. Local roads are paid out of local tax reciepts from sales, property, income, vehicle licensing and fuel. Because many people who do not drive their own cars still derive benefits from the roads (roads include associated sidewalks and bicycle lanes). And those groceries you walk home with from the corner store were delivered by a truck.
Have gnu, will travel.
Last I looked, road and fuel taxes were about five times the amount that's spent on roads in the UK. It's a cash grab, and a stupid one, because that fuel tax ends up increasing the cost of everything Britons buy.
It's one of the reasons my standard of living is much better since i moved across the Atlantic, even though i don't earn much more.
+5 Insightful. /. headline today : "When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"
But to quote another
No, fuel taxes and VED exceed the road budget several times over. In fact they are more than the entire Department for Transport budget in 2013
The Guardian guide to the 2013 budget -> http://www.theguardian.com/uk/interactive/2013/mar/20/budget-spending-interactive
Parliamentary All Party Group on Highways Maintenance breakdown of road maintenance funding -> http://www.highwaysmaintenance.org/funding.asp
RAC Foundation comparison of VED+FD vs Road spending -> http://www.racfoundation.org/data/road-user-taxation-highways-spending-data-chart
I appreciate the last one is coming from the RAC, so they are a tad biased, but I doubt they would be so blatent as to lie about publically available figures.
Sure, I understand that a fuel tax will hit the poor the hardest. However, it is also possible to have a fuel tax without it hurting the poor -- simply redistribute the money from the fuel tax back to the population. The result will be a decrease in fuel usage, and the side effects resulting from that.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You make a convincing argument.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
...whether you notice changes in the price of gasoline without being notified by the media. If you do then you satisfy a fairly broad definition of "middle class".
If you're too poor to own a car and, hence, don't care about gas prices, then you're not middle class. If you're someone to whom a $1/gal delta in the price of gas is more-or-less meaningless then you're not middle class. If you're someone who lives in a dense, urban environment and doesn't own a car by choice then you're probably also not "middle class".
Many geologists claim that the amount of oil recoverable from shale deposits is vastly overestimated by shale oil entrepreneurs. Early this year the EIA decreased their estimate of the oil recoverable from the Monterey shale formation by 96 percent. Certainly there is a large discrepancy between reserves claimed in SEC filings vs. that claimed in public statements.
I wonder if there is a self-interest in operation here?
If the SEC filings are correct we only have a few years of oil from shale in our future. Production will be well into decline by the end of the decade.
If you have a long term market outlook it's something to think about....
Fuel prices tend to drop during election years, and especially years where the (R) have a shot at majority. The oil industry is more than willing to forego a few months profit to get control over the Congress. Expect the nastiest Presidential election ever in 2016 (and another temporary price dip). You know the Keystone XL was the real winner in this recent round of elections..... I'm off to fill my heating oil tank now.....
Cooking for one CAN be a hassle, for sure. I find it often works well to do a middle ground- microwave a frozen burrito, and toss fresh cheese, onions and tomato on top, or whatever I have on hand. I always have cheese on hand because it goes on so many things and is much better fresh than frozen. Similarly, I'll take 30 seconds to toss some ramen in water, then add whatever to make it good. That takes less time than going to McDonald's and costs $300/month less.
> to get something even mildly similar to a big mac.
I was specifically addressing the topic of eating fattening food vs willpower and the question "what about people who CAN'T AFFORD better than a Big Mac". I'm comparing the Big Mac to healthier food, not to a homemade Big Mac. Healthier food costs less than McDonald's food, so people aren't eating McDonald's because they can't afford healthy food.
Trivia fact regarding the Big Mac:
A Big Mac is $4. A McDonald's double cheeseburger with Mac sauce is $1-$1.50 and it's almost exactly the same thing.
I just bought a new premium-requiring gas-guzzling machine. And now gas prices fall dramatically. First time I've ever had such good luck.
Meanwhile, electricity prices go up. Sucks to be a new Tesla owner.
> optionally learning to cook ... pointless to cook only for themselves.
It's been my experience that if you can cook a few things well, attractive members of the opposite sex will eat with you. :)
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is.
I agree with all of your points but you're overgeneralizing a bit. Finland has a population density lower than the United States. In Western Massachusetts a half hour drive (or more) to the grocery store would be considered normal. The whole of the EU isn't Germany, nor is the whole of Massachusetts Boston. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive,"
Obviously, you have never lived or talked to anyone who lives and commutes in Massachusetts. 30 minutes is a short drive. The average commute for my colleagues is between 30 minutes and 60 minutes. Yes, there are people who live and work in Boston/Cambridge and who take public transportation or even walk/bike. But a large number of people who work in Boston live well outside due to sky-high housing costs. Plus, a large majority of employers have offices along or outside of the i95 belt.
Yes, one benefit of living in a high population area is that various box stores are no more than 5 to 10 miles away. So, running errands, getting groceries, etc is much more efficient. But, commuting to work is a different story.
That's only the figure for the national road network, ie. motorways and some A roads (but not all, I think?). Local authorities spend bucketloads of money maintaining minor roads, more than enough to wipe out the direct taxes motorists pay.
Or that was all true last time I looked into it, perhaps things have shifted since.
I wonder how this is affecting our neighbors to the North. Tar sands oil is expensive to extract and it was already being sold at a discount in the US market because they do not have pipelines that allow them to export to other markets. I think the last I heard $75 a barrel was their break even point but this was before they were shipping oil by rail, which must have impacted the cost.
On the contrary, I know quite a few people that currently and formerly live(d) in Massachusetts, though none of them live or work in or very close to Boston. I didn't want to get into the composition details of Massachusetts, though; the larger point is that while people in some places in the United States can afford to use fuel-saving transportation, the majority of places in the US are not those types of places. Most of the land in the US is rural; most of the people in those areas can't just hop on a bicycle or drive an electric car to get where they need to go. That also brings another point to mind: a $7/gal. fuel tax will hit local farmers and significantly increase the cost of food throughout the country, though imported food from countries with no such tax would not suffer the same impact. We could just get all of our vegetables from South America, I suppose.
This, and the the previous poster's point about using a temporary shift in fuel price as a basis for a long-term decision, show that there is a kind of desperate denial in place for many Americans.
They were sold the big dream and are unwilling to see the simple truth; the dream of an easy, middle class life for most Americans is gone. The SUV is their symbol that they still have the kind of economic freedom that a widely-shared national prosperity used to offer. The inconvenient truths that it will cost them outrageous amounts of money to fuel, and that it will probably need major repairs long before the 7 year loan is paid off are comfortably far away when they are in the showroom buying their toy.
Why is the dream gone? That is a whole nother' thread that covers many parallel trends.
But one overarching factor is that the overall pie is stagnant or shrinking. Aside from the unproductive shenanigans of the finance parasites, and a similar milking of trillions of dollars through the for-profit health care system, plus the temporary fracking bubble that drills most of its wells at a loss using other sucker's money, there really aren't many growing sectors of the economy. We've lost many of the productive activities that had broadly-shared economic multipliers.
I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I suspect that it is driven by the inexorable decline in the ease of extraction of energy and all forms of raw materials. The easy oil and gas, the rich deposits of minerals, the virgin forests holding hundreds of years worth of stored growth, the teeming fisheries are all nearly gone. And the easy wealth goes with it.
So rather than clinging to the illusion that our lives will continue to be about which status-enhancing consumer product we should buy next, we probably should start looking at what elements are actually required to have a satisfying life without the pumped-up economic circus.
I'll give a hint--it's not about what you buy, its more about who you love and who can trust you to do what you say you will.
Still there. The discovery of new ways to more cheaply and completely wring a washcloth doesn't change the amount of water it held to begin with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Which indirectsly subsidizes the delivery of all the stuff that the drivers buy.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
As many have pointed out a heavy tax on energy will have repercussions throughout the economy. The best solution I've heard is to immediately distribute the fossil fuel tax equally through the population - that negates rising energy costs for individuals who have below-average energy consumption, while encouraging everyone at all points in the supply chain to shift to now-cheaper alternative energy sources.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I am curious about this. How would the redistribution be performed? Obviously if we take the money away and then hand it right back, the original point of the fuel tax is largely negated, so I assume that's not what you meant.
Would it be fair to say that you don't believe that air pollution harms the economy on your coast (in other words, that the cost of air pollution is exactly $0.00) because you don't like one of the solutions?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That's like arguing that we should just accept obesity as human nature, and figure out how to adapt to it.
We are already doing that. People such as myself who are fit and trim have been shoved to the side in the clothing arena. About all you can find now are pants with a waist above 34 and the smallest shirts in medium with XL and XXL being very common.
Then you have the NHTSA moving to use fatter crash dummies in their tests, asking car manufacturers to use longer seat belts and airlines having to recalculate the weight of passengers because Americans (in particular) are getting fatter by the day.
The idea that people shouldn't waddle when they walk has been abandoned in favor of excuses (see the story further up for why the solutions to this problem are being ignored).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It would be fair to say that what you just said has nothing to do with what I said. It would also be fair to say that the post I responded to pointed out a study for SoCal as evidence that there's "a problem" without acknowledging that the study doesn't cover the 99% of the United States that is not SoCal. I'm willing to bet that the air quality here is very different from that in SoCal, in large part due to comparatively sparse population density. You put the assertion of "the cost of air pollution is exactly $0.00" which is a straw man argument. Do you have a study that leads to the same rough conclusions that your original source does, but that is also more representative of the country as a whole (or even regions that are not a relatively small portion of one state?)
You could tax the fuel. Then distribute the tax revenue equally among all citizens. Then, anyone who uses more fuel than average loses out, but anyone who uses less fuel than average gains a source of income. This will totally screw anyone who uses lots of gasoline, but that kind of is the point. You could partially deduct fuel expense necessary for business to focus more of the impact on recreational or inefficient use. If you think it still hits the poor too hard, you can distribute it based on income.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Whenever I buy a car, I build a spreadsheet to compare Total Cost of Ownership for several different models. One of the inputs, of course, is the price of fuel.
If that variable goes up, I am steered toward a more fuel-efficient vehicle, and according to Anthony Perl, I "have the willpower to stick with the program." But apparently I should banish that factor from my spreadsheet if the price of fuel goes down, lest I be steered toward a less fuel-efficient vehicle, and become guilty of a huge characater flaw.
I mean, an addiction to large overpriced SUVs that never touch dirt or mud is clearly an addiction spiraling out of control that we should probably earmark billions in taxpayer money.
You're being sarcastic, but Dubya took real action toward that end.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Uh...unable to control their "willpower" when buying a car?
Someone I know buys cars "because the salesman talks so nice". She sometimes goes to those things where dealers give free stuff, but sometimes says she's afraid to go because she might end up buying a car. Occasionally, she hands the phone to me and asks me to tell the salesman on the phone "no" for her, because she doesn't want to be rude.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Hi there, reality check here.
This is how petroleum prices are managed:
When the oil and gas industry wants fuel prices to be low they optimize the fuel supply chain and keep petroleum flowing so the supply meets demand.
When they want fuel prices to go up, they burden the supply chain to increase demand. One of their favorite tricks is to pilot their fuel container ships to about 20 miles off the coast of port and park them there, waiting for fuel prices to go up.
Fuel prices are managed much like department store sales.
Department stores gradually increase the price of popular items until customers stop buying, then they have a "sale" where they reduce the price of those items to the normal retail price.
Then they start to gradually drive up the prices again.
The petroleum industry does something similar; gradually drives prices up until consumers start to look into alternative fuel measures by stifling the supply of petroleum. Then when that point is reached they have a "sale" where they optimize the supply chain.
Your average consumer sees this as a modern miracle instead of researching to find out why the price went down, and they celebrate by driving, flying and using power sports vehicles more than ever.
Every time the supply chain is stifled the lowest price for petroleum notches upward a little bit to prevent customers from dumping petroleum but raise the overall price at the same time.
Nobody fears a nuclear Iran more than the Saudis, not even the Israelis.
Is that a rational fear; is an Iranian nuke more likely to be detonated in Riyadh than Tel Aviv? (Or, given that Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terror, transferred to a terrorist cell that floats it on a small boat into New York Harbor?)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
More than 250,000 UK citizens have been killed by cold temperatures, despite how inexpensive energy is. To the extent people advocate against inexpensive energy, the death rate will increase, and the victims' [frozen] blood will on he hands of the advocates.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Is that a rational fear; is an Iranian nuke more likely to be detonated in Riyadh than Tel Aviv?
It is unlikely to be detonated in either place. Iranians don't want nukes to attack their neighbors, they want them as a defensive deterrent. Once they have nukes, they will have more freedom of action to push their interests in other areas, such as backing Syria, and promoting Shiite unrest in the Western Gulf (Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Gulf Provinces), etc. Most countries that have developed nukes in violation of the NPT have been richly rewarded. India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, all have security, respect, and deterrence. The guys who cooperated, and gave up their nuke programs (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi), are dead.
The poor pay a larger percentage of their income to fuel costs. Fracking lowers the cost of fuel. Therefore, I am for fracking because I am not in favor if a caste system. Environmentalists sounds like French pre-revolutionary land owners. They hate when the poor sully their lands with hunting for food.
33 gallons of gas a week for a year is 1,716 gallons. That study makes the case for approximately one dollar per gallon tax at most.
The taxes on motor fuels should go to maintaining the roads and bridges. (and thats for both seasons of road maintenance - we are right on the transition from road construction to snow removal)
There should be a federal tax to pay for the interstate system, and state tax to pay for state/county roads and bridges.
High taxation as a cause of the fall of civilization is a myth.
Not a myth at all. True, it's not a certainty, but high taxes have often caused societies to fall to civil wars, outside invaders, or simply to decline relative to lower-taxing societies. I highly recommend For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams for an overview of this.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
You mean like North Dakota, Texas, and California?
What would such a study prove? That the cost of air pollution is nonzero outside of Southern California? Isn't that already obvious?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I bought an electric car, volt, and after 6 months - I feel like I'm getting a $300 pay raise a month.
Yep - my electric bill goes up a whopping $25 a month, and I no longer sit in line at the costco gas
station.
Beat that
May as well burn it as quickly as possible.
Maybe if an $18,000 electric car with a 500 mile range that could charge in under an hour were developed, that would change.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You want to solve the obesity issue ? The fix is rather simple, remove the added sugar. It's easy to avoid the obvious stuff, not so easy when damn near anything purchased in a store has some sort of added sugar in it.
Challenge: While avoiding the organic isle, walk through any store and look at various items and note how much of it contains sugar. It's in quite a few things you wouldn't even think of.
Eating a block of it once per day, or eating smaller amounts of it several times a day equates to the same intake. Reduce the sugar, and you fix the problem.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
People driving around in cars is only a tiny part of it. You could stop everyone from driving a petroleum fueled car right now, and it would make little or no difference. Heavy industry, HVAC in homes and businesses - that's what does it. The solution is nukes or one form or another. Solar and wind can't put a dent in it, and China's not going to stop putting a new coal-fired power plant online EVERY WEEK any time soon. Cars have got almost nothing to do with it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If the Saudi's decide to flood the market a lot of sellers will be capping wells.
Our biology demands certain himidity levels for our sweat to cool our bodies. The higher temperatures in high humidity locations will eventually become's early. So we can spend millions on adapting or spend much less on adapting our economy to work to help the environment. It's not rocket science we fix the problem and move along out we fail to adapt and die.
Actually, there is already a significant state and federal gas tax as well as transportation taxes. It is amazing that people like you aren't aware of this.
While you may hate my idea, out of miss-informed reasons, it is interesting to see how much discussion it has generated. I'm quite serious.
"Drivers across America are rejoicing at falling gasoline prices as pumps across the country dip below $3 a gallon .. while it's nice to get the break at the gas pump and the economic benefits of an energy boom at home" ..
..
"Specifically, with energy business as usual, the world is on a trajectory to raise the mean global temperature by at least 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) by the end of century, and possibly far more, a climate disruption that most scientists regard as catastrophic ref
Great reply! I am always discussing topics like this with knowledgeable people.
One person tells me taxes and government are bad and it is good that in US, most people are required to pay for their own college/university education whereas in some other industrial nations, college/university education is free and therefore open to all segments of population, which is bad because individuals don't take responsibility for themselves when education is free and everyone has to pay for goof-offs. But that's another topic.
Taxes on every level, you'r right.. really bad, all should get privatized because government does a lousy job - just look at Obamacare, a total flop, which soon will get replaced by something much better which was there before.
All people already live half in paradise - soon it will be happening totally for everyone.
They'll be doing them a favor. Those wells will still be there when the Saudis' run dry. And of course the Saudis know that, and we know that they know... and so on...
They will tread softly. A good parasite will nurture the host for their mutual benefit, a very well understood and very natural symbiotic relationship. We can do much better though than to let these pirates monopolize the business and be giving the key to the city to their lackeys.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Technology marches on. Sooner or later alternatives will become more viable than oil. Next decade or maybe 5 or 6 decades but it's coming.
You asserted that air pollution causes economic damages totaling $1600 per person per year and that the people who caused that economic damage should pay for it. You also implied that $1600 per person per year is a significant enough problem to need a government-enforced corrective action, though there is not enough context given to support that implication.
What's the difference between $0, $0.01, $1, and $1600? Proportion. Your later arguments have expanded your implication to state that any value of economic damages above $0 requires government-enforced corrective action. I do not accept such a premise. This is a shade of grey, not black-and-white. I want to see some information that shows not only that the problem exists, but also that the problem is BOTH statistically significant enough to need action AND that the action being proposed will make enough of a difference proportional to its total cost to be a better alternative than maintaining the status quo.
TFA3 "Will Cheap Gas Undermine Climate-Change Efforts?" [...] "I don't think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today," Perl said. Instead, he explained, people may choose to fill up their cars and burn fuel while the costs are low. [...] "This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," Perl said. âoeSome people might have the willpower to stick with their program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before committing to a diet --- but if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty traumatic."
This dialogue is straight from the United States' temperance movement that led up to a Constitutional amendment and a decade of peril, a black market economy comparable in size to the real one, and the Federally-subsidized ascension of organized crime. Some people think they are being proactive, easing their view of a world 'sin tax' as a way to stay global catastrophe. They are being hoodwinked into believing that unless they act soon by accepting some prepared package of countermeasures, some point of no return would be reached. This is being done in the traditional way, fronting claims that the (terrorists, evil corporations, fossil fuel interests) have "almost won".
But the real tripe, such as Perl spouts, misrepresents and marginalizes the personal motives among the poor and middle class folks who've managed to (just) stay afloat, and use their resources to acquire certain contested 'things'. Complicated and realistic motives, the whole spectrum of survival through pursuit of happiness (aka sanity) are reduced to some simple addict-reward-temperance model that suits the purpose. Then add a dash of global imperative and we have things like
I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traffic is not morally second.
~Elizabeth Stuart Phelps who helped to 'ferment' a revolution
Abolish slavery, then alcohol? This lady says this in 1897, a time when neither women nor former slaves in the US were permitted to vote. Priorities problem, much? Now cheap gas and pure-CO2 is the alcohol of the 21st century, and the same style of temperance movement is forming. It is hip and trendy. No one will confront you if you publicly picket for temperance in these matters.
Perhaps they should. Because where the rubber hits the road, such temperance movements are ultimately damaging to society. Phelps may have believed that the abolition of alcohol would magically 'elevate the human condition' to such a degree that other pressing issues of her day would be somehow solved, that it was drunkenness that was denying women the vote, or any other issue of the day to which she could have refocused her effort.
I'll say it flat out. Real people tend to have rational and understandable reasons for doing what they do. They will choose a vehicle that can hold a family and haul a load with a measure of real metal to stabilize it and protect them. They will choose a $30k truck or minivan over a $50k Tesla because... they have a choice.
Real innovation arises by pursuing real solutions to problems that result in the right choice being the cheapest one, not the one least encumbered by taxation. The future does not depend on the 'price of gas'. Temperance movements are ultimately about removing choice from the equation.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The Sprinter is LESS efficient, it gets WORSE mileage.
The thing that drives me nuts over the whole AGW thing is that it is a distraction from the real reason we need to embrace renewables - fossil fuels are non-renewable and will be depleted in hundred years or less. We're passing peak oil now and we're on the downhill slide. Screw the environmental aspects, the socio-economic aspects are what are going to kick our asses if we don't get in gear soon. We have time to shift to a renewable energy infrastructure, particularly for transportation, but cheap gas slows progress in this regard. Gas will be inexpensive until it costs three of your newborn children for a gallon - it will be a quick hockey-stick exponential cost increase. At that point we will have weeks to build a new infrastructure that really requires decades to implement and must start now. AGW might actually be a thing, but unfortunately it is based on predictions of the behavior of a wildly chaotic non-linear system, so no one will really know until it happens. We'll be out of fossil fuels before we know for sure. The economic impact is the argument that both the blue and red sides might agree upon. Or not.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Cheaper prices due to recent elections. Prices will go up again anyways!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
Yes, then we can charge up our poisonous battery powered cars from coal.
But we are also supposed to stop burning coal, so I guess we will charge them from nuclear power.
But Congress shut down Yucca Mountain, so now nuclear power is not sustainable as we cannot safely store the radioactive waste. Instead, we should use wind, water, and solar power to charge them.
But wind, water, and molten-salt solar generators kill animals, require toxic emissions to mine the necessary rare earth metals, and don't generate sufficient power for the world's needs.
Thus, the only remaining solution is to reduce the earth's population back to a sustainable level: Will you volunteer?
No? Then I guess we'll both have to go back to the drawing board and think up a practical solution.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
People driving around in cars is only a tiny part of it. You could stop everyone from driving a petroleum fueled car right now, and it would make little or no difference. Heavy industry, HVAC in homes and businesses - that's what does it. The solution is nukes or one form or another. Solar and wind can't put a dent in it, and China's not going to stop putting a new coal-fired power plant online EVERY WEEK any time soon. Cars have got almost nothing to do with it.
Sorry, I don't think that is right. See this link. From the article:
Our cars and trucks are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, they account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas. About 5 pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Just so we agree, you concede that the damage to the economy of air pollution is nonzero across the country, correct?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I can't concede that because I have been presented no evidence of that. If we're seriously going to go down this path of discussing the economic damage of air pollution, let's talk about some of the positive aspects of air pollution as well, and how they weigh against the negatives...
If you don't agree that the cost of air pollution is nonzero, then logically you must think that the cost of air pollution is exactly zero.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That book is not going to support your argument, and you know it.
The point is not that taxation is bad, but that corrupt systems of taxation are bad
There is a fuckton of a difference between a high taxation and a corrupt taxation regime.
... whatever
Nice try, but you missed the two large difference between the US and Europe: 1. Europe has, in most places, a robust public transport system and 2. Europeans actually find public transport a good thing and, therefore, use it.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
given that Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terror
I find it a dubious assessment. Most extremist Islam worldwide is Sunni (Salafi), and the biggest sponsor of that is Saudi Arabia.
Sounds like a nuclear-armed Iran would be good news for us then. The harder they hate and want to fight each other, the less they'll bother us.
There is short game, and there is long game.
Relying on our rivals or enemies for a strategic resource they have huge pricing power over, is not a good long-term strategy.
Even if this global warming nonsense wasn't the most huge hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind and probably more dangerous than the last hoax of eugenics which inspired the likes of Hitler, pauparizing everyone except the very very rich, and attempting to create a society of only the very very rich and the very very poor by raising energy prices is not a righteous goal.
Lets compromise. Lets do everything we can to lower energy prices and thereby boost near-universal prosperity, while spending the resultant surplus money from said prosperity to bury the internal combustion engine, and later the external combustion ways of generating power forever. Something like this may someday actually happen:
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
but if it doesn't, then SOMETHING, but only if we have the available money supplies to pursue it. Available money supplies do not tend to spring out of a society where 99% of the people are dirt-poor and 1% are extremely wealthy, but that's what high-cost energy tends to promote.
Sure, $7 a gallon fuel tax in a country 3000 miles wide and 1500 miles tall where public transport is near-impossible most places makes all kinds of sense.
We hate cyclists because they're all over the G-damned place and eventually we're going to crush one with the car and then go to jail for 20 years. F cyclists, get 'em off the G-damned roadway where they aren't a hazard to themselves and others. Even worse are night cyclists - I can't see a F'n thing when I've got boneheads coming at me with their bright lights on on a 2-lane twisty-A'd road, and so if there's a biker just beyond them, I can't see him. What am I supposed to do, stop until the oncoming car goes by? Then I'm just as likely to get rammed in the A by someone that doesn't expect me to be stopping in the middle of the F'n road. U can't imagine how much I hate cyclists on the public roads.
The guys who cooperated, and gave up their nuke programs (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi), are dead.
Or not doing too well, esp. the Ukraine.
They even got US and Russian promises that "nothing bad will happen, we promise. Cross our hearts and hope to die" and all that...
Stefan Axelsson
Wrong on so many counts:
Other poster has covered that "In total, the U.S. transportation sectorâ"which includes planes, trains, ships, and freightâ"produces around thirty percent of all U.S. global warming emissions."
Explain to me how Solar PV is not well suited to supplying electricity for Air Conditioning. Seriously, it's a perfect match. It is also a good match for 9-5 businesses. Wind energy is so cheap now it'd be nuts not to take advantage of it. Solar is well on it's way to becoming the cheapest source of energy.
http://costofsolar.com/cost-of...
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...
http://bxhorn.com/wp-content/u...
Completely wrong. Chinaâ(TM)s Coal Consumption Has Finally Decreased
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
Which they do by haranguing people for being too poor or aware of the concept of 'cost of ownership' & general logistics to buy electric cars, and proposing using taxes to...keep people who aren't rich enough to own an electric car from being able to afford to drive cars, and at least where I've been there's no sign that public transit will step up to fill the gap.
If the elite want to see the internal combustion engine gone, they can and should spend their own money on improving the infrastructure and underwriting the additional costs they're imposing.
Or they could just admit publicly that at least part of their problem is too many uppity peasants cluttering up their roads. Either will satisfy me, really.
though nice to see lower gas prices, but all things considered from global politics to increasing CO2 content in atmosphere plus fracking and crises in middle east in addition to this year's elections. I find it somewhat scary why prices are lower and wonder if they will jump way up. Govts are seeking revenue (they get less from the rich) there are plans to tax mileage so with lower prices more car traveling which working smucks that have long commutes will bear more of the burden. Oh well, my morning gripes.
mfwright@batnet.com
This isn't an American-supported effort to drain a renewed aggressive stance from the former Soviet Union? I thought low oil prices is one major vector that Reagan used to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I assumed this was kind of a response to Putin's actions in the Ukraine.
Taxing fuel at such an astronomical rate will certainly lower the amount of fuel use, but how many businesses will have to shut down because customers can't afford to blow $14 on fuel that they weren't spending before just to patronize those businesses?
This is actually massively under-stating the problem. The costs of all kinds of things go up proportionate to the tax on fuel, and these costs primarily impact the poor and the middle class (effectively increasing concentration of wealth in the super-rich).
It's not just customers that have to spend money on fuel, it's all the people that keep the public and private infrastructure of society in working order: the utility workers, the plumbers, the carpenters, the electricians, the safety inspectors, the fire fighters, the police officers, the medical personnel, and so forth. In most cases, it isn't practical for these people to do most of their work remotely (or even to live close to their jobs).
There are also people who need to move around as part of keeping the natural environment healthy, such as forest rangers (doing all kinds of jobs), scientists, hunters (hunters help to keep animal populations under control), and volunteers doing all kinds of things. All this requires vehicle transportation.
In some parts of the USA, goats are used at sites overrun with noxious and invasive non-native weeds, as a form of weed control that doesn't involve man-made chemicals (with their unknown and potentially disastrous long term environmental consequences). The goats need to be moved from site to site, and taken care of, which requires movement of people and supplies. If we increase the cost of innovative approaches like this to dealing with environmental problems, we force the use of more man-made chemicals. A gas tax policy intended to help the environment could actually end up harming it!
Then there's the issue of bringing food to the markets. This applies both to the big commercial markets, and to the small farmers markets that are so important to getting fresh, organic food grown by people one actually knows (and also helping independent farmers outside the corporate farming system -- with all its well documented problems such as over-use of anti-biotics -- to survive).
There's also the issue of needing transportation to get to places where one can do healthy exercise (such as swimming pools), thus maintaining the physical fitness of members of society and reducing the negative health and economic impacts of obesity. The poor have a lot less time available to include exercise in their lives than the rich, and anything that makes it harder to do this has negative consequences to society.
There's also the issue of getting to school for classes, something particularly important not just for the young, but for all those that need re-training or need to develop new skills to have reasonable prospects of improving their lives over the long term (and improving their children's lives). Much of this education, such as trade school education, can not be conducted remotely because of the need for hands on activities (we should be vastly improving our capability to do remote education, but that is a separate issue). The poor and the middle class have the most need for continuing education, and thus are hurt the most by these policies.
In short, a sales tax on gas not only hurts the poor and the middle class directly in terms of getting to their jobs and to places where they can buy food, but hurts these folks (and society in general) in all kinds of indirect ways.
A lot of folks in our society are making claims that a tax on gas is friendly to society and the environment, and producing all kinds of propaganda to support these claims, but they don't seem to have the intelligence to be think about the negative consequences of doing this. These policies are not necessarily friendly to society, and in some ways they aren't even friendly to the environment. Perhaps we should view people that favor
That book is not going to support your argument, and you know it.
The point is not that taxation is bad, but that corrupt systems of taxation are bad
There is a fuckton of a difference between a high taxation and a corrupt taxation regime.
Wow, way to move the goalposts and accuse me of a bad faith argument, while selectively quoting an Amazon review of a book you have clearly not read. The full sentence you selectively quote is:
Unlike you, I have read the book. Yes, he talks about corrupt tax systems (e.g. the use of independent "tax farmers" to collect revenue). But no, it's not simply about corruption, and documents many instances of high tax systems being bad. E.g., Crete was a major Mediterranean power that derived a great deal of revenue from taxing traders. Then the relative backwater of Rome offered duty-free ports, traders preferred that, and Rome rose while Crete fell. Hundreds of years later, the Roman empire was huge and taxes were high. When barbarian invaders came from the North, many communities did not resist, because at least their taxes would be lower. Part of the early spread of Islam happened similarly: the Muslims promised lower taxes for conversion, so rather than fight or pay extra tax as Christians, they converted.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
That was incoherent.
but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is. If I want to visit an area with a lot of large shops and restaurants, I'm looking at a 30-mile drive at a minimum; 40 miles if I want to go somewhere that actually has American corporate icons like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, Best Buy, etc.
I know exactly what you're talking about; live in North Carolina in a rural agricultural community, as do most people in this state, and to visit and businesses that are remotely interesting or useful I have to go to Winston-Salem and just to get to the edge of Winston-Salem it is about a half hour drive from me, or about 30 miles, and Charlotte is about a two hour drive, or about 90 miles, from me. I rarely visit Greensboro because I have to go all the way down to the center of Winston-Salem and get on I-40 so it sits at about an hour drive. There has been talk about building a Wal-Mart in a nearby town that is beginning to emerge as a major community but I don't think it is going to materialize which is unfortunate because it would save me a lot of time.
I suppose one could move closer but the cost of real estate is outrageous and the cost of renting would be a small fortune out of my paycheck every month so there is that.
I was comparing real-world road driving I've seen reported. Is that 6.9L figure a government estimate based on a synthetic formula?
Ah you're right, thanks for the correction. I had ~10bn for expenditure and ~8bn for tax in my head, but I'd clearly got the tax mixed up.
is that while other companies have to prepare for disaster or have an action plan in place in case of disaster, oil companies do not. Impending hurricane? It might stop production of oil for a day or two, so we have to raise prices in preparation for that. Then even if nothing happens, they don't have to repay that money or put it aside (like any other company). They get to keep that as profit and then the next quarter earnings reports show "a record profit" It's bullshit. The oil companies should have money put aside for unplanned events (disaster preparedness) just like any other company has to do.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.
See also:
http://fuhrmaneattolivereview....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."
Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
More differences: European railroads are generally much better used in general than US railroads. European drivers tend to have much more fuel-efficient cars than US drivers, since they've had higher-priced fuel for a long time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Lower gas prices are great, I like to pay less, but we already accustomed ourselves to higher prices. So the right thing to do is increase taxes on gasoline and have that funding go exclusively to infrastructure projects, such as fixing the gazillion potholes, crumbling bridges, and especially expanding rail and other public transit. If the idea is to raise taxes and throw it all in the big pot called general fund then forget it. If we pay more it should have meaning, not feed pet projects of powerful Congress people.
Your assumption that I sometimes buy new cars in incorrect. Cars depreciate about as fast as PCs, and I take great satisfaction knowing that someone else ate that depreciation.
But whether I buy new or used is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. If it's logical for people to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle when the price of fuel increases (and it is), it is also logical -- not a lack of willpower or other character flaw -- for people to buy a less fuel-efficient vehicle when the price of fuel decreases. Anthony Perl can't have it both ways.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Good point, you're talking about the "Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances" in which "Ukraine gave up the world's third largest nuclear weapons stockpile." Ukraine is ruing the day it was suckered into those "Security Assurances."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Iranians don't want nukes to attack their neighbors, they want them as a defensive deterrent.
Your faith in the rationality of this Great-Satan-rhetoric-spewing, eschatology-minded, 12th-imam-loving nation is greater than mine.
The guys who cooperated, and gave up their nuke programs (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi), are dead.
I recall Gaddafi voluntarily handing over materiel, and being much more cooperative with UN weapons inspectors than Hussein. He should have been rewarded with, perhaps, a quiet asylum villa where he could have lived out his retirement. Not this: "The video appears to picture Gaddafi being poked or stabbed in the rear 'with some kind of stick or knife' or possibly a bayonet".
That that is is that that that that is not is not.