Hey, this is great news! Let’s sue OPEC because they’re not behaving the way we think that they should. Let’s impose our laws on foreign countries. Let’s bite the hand that feeds us, so to speak. That always works well. 1973 and 1979 were halcyon days for us, so much so that we’re taking calculated steps to enable us to relive them.
Windfall taxes, antitrust lawsuits…are our lawmakers actually trying to precipitate a depression? I only ask because they are doing everything that I would do if that were my goal.
May I suggest a good pair of walking shoes before they get too expensive? On the bright side, they’re certainly taking the right steps to eliminate the obesity problem. We won’t be able to afford to eat or to drive, so the pounds should just melt off.
That’s not a particularly compelling comparison, though. Their increases have been over a longer period of time. They didn’t just wake up and find out that the price of gas had doubled overnight.
We could get used to $10/Gallon gas if it happened gradually, in the same way that smokers adjusted to the 500% increase over the last 10 years or so because it happened slowly. A price spike like that would be devastating here.
OPEC supplies around 45% of all imported US crude oil (Cite). Were this to become law, what incentive would they have to continue dealing with us? Perhaps I’m being too much of a pessimist, but I could see OPEC doing a little tit-for-tat and using the oil weapon to tell us to go to hell.
I always hear this, but I’d like to see figures on their average commute distance vs. ours, and their mass transit availability vs. ours.
Here in Phoenix - 5th largest city in the US - public transportation is virtually non-existant. We have buses, but they take hours to travel the distance you can go in a few minutes in a car, and then it’s highly unlikely that you’re reasonably close to your destination, or that your departure point was very near a bus stop in the first place, for that matter. I doubt the same problem exists in any of the top 5 largest cities in the UK.
Which is simply not an option in many parts of the US. We are not served by the kind of transit systems available in the UK. And we do not have walk-to-work housing.
I think of some of the rural poor where I grew up, and I don’t know how they make it. They often have to drive great distances to get to whatever construction job or factory job they can find. They are struggling and failing to make ends meet now. I’m having a hard time imagining the economic upheaval that will occur here if gas goes to $10.
“Move closer to work!” I can almost hear some of you shouting. Yeah? If you’re a roofer in a rural community, how do you move closer to your job? If you live in a rural area but work in a factory 30 miles away, how will you sell your house in a world of $10 gas? Nobody will want to buy it.
One could hope. Part of me wants to think that this is election-year posturing to prove that they’re “doing something”, but this hits a little too close to the mark when you look at the other asinine ideas that they and the candidates have proposed for me to be completely sure.
The last time I can remember there being a veto-proof majority in the House and a rejection in the senate was over the flag-burning amendment a few years ago. This seems a bit more relevant and timely to dismiss out of hand.
Honestly, I have trouble seeing why they’d care. So far as I could tell from the article, this law creates a “Task Force”, which seems approximately equivalent to doing nothing, except it’ll cost more. OPEC pretty openly admits to colluding to manage prices (I believe its even in their charter), so its not like they’ll even deny the charge.
In short, it seems like something for Congress to pass to pretend to be doing something about high gas prices, without actually doing anything. It won’t lower gas prices, but it won’t raise them
This is a problem that the US has. It’s not easy to overnight rebuild infrastructures which permit efficient public transportation. Japanese live in apartments and condos which are two to 50 stories tall. The closer to the center, and the more built up it becomes. Whole areas are buildings with nothing less than 5 or 6 floors.
We’ve got a (relative) gas-guzzler, not that it’s an SUV, but a 5 series BMW. Still, I mostly drive it on the weekends for shopping or out to golf, so some months I spend less then $50 on gas, even at the current $6 a gallon. Our current place is a 10 minute walk from the closest station, and our new house will be about 15.
In the spirit that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, we pay in size. Our new home will be only 840 sq ft. The property itself will only be 515 sq ft, for which we will pay dearly.
Invading Saudi Arabia to arrest the princes would be a much easier proposition than invading Iran. Actually, invading Saudi Arabia would have made a lot more sense than invading Iraq, given all the Saudi connections to 9/11.
For anyone looking for more details: The bill in question is HR 6074: “Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act of 2008.” Oddly enough, there is a secondary title, which is a bit more clear:
At least the Senate versions of this bill are more clearly, and honestly named. For the moment. “The Opec Accountability Act.”
I just don’t see where the US has the leverage to force OPEC dammit that is an acronym to do anything. And trying will, as Airman Doors suggests, only give them the incentive to prove it.
ETA: Cisco, each floor contributes its footage to the total, but the lot gets counted only once.
And if we did invade Saudi Arabia in order to avoid $5 a gallon gas, at least we wouldn’t have to have those endless arguments about whether it was “all about the oil”.
I thought we should have struck a deal with the Kuwaitis: “We’ll give you your country back and you give us 50% of your oil for the next 50 years. Free.”
