Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that the price of an SUV does not reflect the cost of you owning one. Petrol prices go some small way to correcting that, so it's bad when the correction factor is reduced.
It's a real cognitive problem. It seems like you personally buying an inefficient vehicle has little overall effect, but collectively it massively increases healthcare, cleaning and military costs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
> 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.
We had inexpensive energy for a long time and it didn't fix all of society, so it's only one factor. And if every poor person could drive a car, traffic would be so slow that it would be quicker to walk.
Raise the cost or taxes on fuel and use it to build much better mass transit and subsidize the price of fruit & veggies, milk & meat produced domestically.
That will do more for the poor - with universal, single-payer, healthcare than simply having cheap gasoline.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A fossil fuel tax (assuming it worked as advertised to bring consumption down) would have the added benefit of keeping oil prices down. When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up. A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous. And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way. The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
but collectively it massively increases healthcare, cleaning and military costs.
The United States sources the lion's share of her crude oil from western hemisphere sources. Most of these have friendly relations (Canada, Mexico) with the United States, are domestic (off shore) resources, or come from countries (Venezuela) that talk a big game about how horrible the Yankees are but continue to do business with them.
China, Japan, and the EU are the major economies that are dependent on Middle Eastern oil, which begs the question of why they aren't the ones spending their blood and treasure to try and stabilize the region. In the case of the EU and Japan it's an unwillingness on the part of their populations to engage in such adventures, combined with the fact that they have no need, since the United States is willing to do it for them. In the case of China it's a lack of power projection ability combined with the trepidation the West and Japan would feel if China started intervening in the region. Personally I think we should let them have a go at it; it would give the radicalized elements in the Middle East someone new to hate, at least for a little while.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Next time try a front wheel drive with decent tires. Safer and better than a 4wd in anything other than steep / deep (ie, on roads).
4WD vehicles have this funny habit of breaking all four tires loose at the same time. Front wheel drive vehicles tend to break the rear tires first, allowing you to control the vehicle with the fronts. Anyhow, it's mostly tires and driver.
4WD SUVs are fun to watch flip over. The combination of an icy road, a 4WD, a bad driver, some speed and the laws of physics can be pretty entertaining.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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 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.