dnicho05 said:
You need to check your stats. Crude oil has only gone up by 20% in the last year and a half from $40 a barrel to $66 a barrel the other day. The price of refined gasoline is what has doubled in the past year and a half.
You, uh, might wanna check your math.
Except that we're buying the gas that was made from oil purchased a year or more ago for quite a bit less.
Uh...and those VERY SAME PEOPLE are having to pay MORE for futures NOW! Do you think you are entitled to the price they paid???
I love how this works. "This is a FREE COUNTRY," everyone says. Oh, yeah, free for YOU. I get it. YOU should not have to pay for anything.
Pay what the market will bear...don't like it? Don't drive.
But, before anyone brands me unsympathetic, I AGREE. The government KNEW about Peak Oil and did nothing to salve its impact. So, we wil pay the price.
Our "free market" government has allowed idiot consumer demand to drive allocation of capital. So, we got urban sprawl. We have NO mass transit system worth crap. Nothing but a bunch of huge, lumbering, polluting, empty buses that clog up the road. Our system is inefficient because it wasn't planned.
Sure, it will get more efficient in a hurry or die when oil hits $100/bbl. But, our land use, truck fetishes, CAFE, all of it, were complete GARBAGE.
We just let a consumer market decide, based upon what they wanted right now, our national energy policy.
We are half as efficient as the EU, and 1/4 as Japan, in terms of additional energy needed/additional $1M GDP. We're about at the world average, which is atrocious for a country so technically rich. But, we have miles and miles of asphalt and minimansions in the exurbs and everyone just HAD to have an SUX6000 which got 8mpg in the American Tradition.
And, everyone laughed. People who drove Expeditions BRAGGED about how much fuel they wasted. It's like burning $100 bills, pretending to be rich. I have no sympathy for people like this.
Here I am w/ my programmable thermostat and the heat turned down and the A/C turned hot so that I can save energy so my neighbor can lumber down the road with one person in a 4 ton vehicle and while land developers can put up MORE road-congesting traffic lights and strip malls.
GM? They think that this is all "cyclical." We've never seen anything like this, they say, where people dumped gashogs for small, fuel-efficient cars. Right in the Washington Pest yesterday. Inventories are ENORMOUS now on SUVs...like 80 days worth, while Priuses are at 7 days. And, GM is whistling past the graveyard. No small cars, nothing fuel efficient. Oh, this never happened before. Uh...1970 ring any bells, idiots?
Don't hold your breath for a Honda supercar.
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