This might sound a bit weird, but at priceline.com you can name the price you’d like to pay for gas, which is about 25 cents less than usual, & pay for it & use the card you get at the station to get gas…spiffy.
If you think YOU have it bad…
In England, gas prices are usually around 2$ (American dollars), and have risen since. Imagine. Gas price is estimated to be on average between $4 and $5! I dunno if that’s gallon or litre, though, and imagine they’re counting gallons (it was a US newspaper).
I suggest to everyone, US or UK, the following common-sense advice:
1)Go out to your local store.
2)Find and buy a comfortable pair of shoes.
3)Walk.
jab1 wrote:
I live in Morgan Hill, CA, which is a few miles south of San Jose (the heart of the Silicon Valley). Last time I gassed up, 92 octane premium unleaded cost $1.89 per gallon. (I’m glad my car gets 35 MPG!)
California gasoline prices seem to have less to do with how rich an area is, than with how many cars are in that ares.
In that area, not in that “ares”. I doubt the Greek God of War has anything to do with California’s gasoline prices!
You know, I usually respect Snopes’ stuff, and I agree that this gas-out thing sounds like a “pfft” :), but you have to wonder when they speak of the
I mean, do they think OPEC is some paranoid’s imagination, like the Illuminati? OPEC is a genuine organization, whose aim is to increase the revenue of its member nations, usually at the expense of non-member consumer nations, including the US and Canada. If Snopes isn’t willing to at least admit that, then they’d better hang up their hats.
The only way to get the gas prices back down is to convince OPEC that too-high oil prices will end up hurting their own countries as well, either by making a concerted effort to use less OPEC-supplied oil, or by pointing out how much consumer goods will increase in price when shipping costs more due to higher oil prices.
Will a “gas-out” do the trick? Doubtful. Is there an oil cartel attempting (and, to a great degree, succeeding) in controlling the price of crude oil and, by extension, petrolium products such as gasoline? Yes, it’s called OPEC, and it’s reality, not Urban Legend, Snopes.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Tell Mexico the loans are due now, and we’ll gladly reposes those oil wells when they default?
Ugh. I can’t wait to pay off my new car so I can move into the frat house. Right now, I drive a Z24, not exactly a guzzler, but not a sipper, either. More like a swallower (I’m gonna pay for that one). I have to drive an hour to classes, a half hour to work, then 45 minutes home. That translates into a tank ever two or three days. At fifteen bucks a tank, that’s alot of money. I’m spending nearly as much on gas as I would on rent at the house.
I remember the heady days of my long distant youth, filling up on 89 octane for a mere $.65 a gallon (two years ago, thereabouts). Now, I’m paying about 150% more. Geez. I know gas is cheapest in the midwest, but still, it’s tough for me to get by when I have to pay 1.45 a gallon. I'm a poor college student. And to top it off, if I step down to 87 octane, I save .10 a gallon, but I use twice as much. $.10 more to 91, and I use about 20% less, but I don’t know if that works out to be worth it, I suck at math. ::sigh:: Send lawyers, guns, and money, I’m goin to the mideast and having a talk with these towelheads.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
Priceline.com will be selling gas soon you can save 10-20 cents a gallon (if my memory serves me right).
~-MCM-~
Geez you guys- Whatever happened to public transportation?
I hate paying these prices too, especially since I drive a full size 4X4 pickup with “bigfatahrs” but this “Gas-out” thing is assinine.
Think about it. So you don’t buy gas on a certain day… you’ll buy it the day before or the day after and they still get their money. The only way it might work is to reduce long-term demand by parking your vehicles… How many of us are willing to do that?
The price, while higher than a year ago is just now reaching 1990 prices IIRC and are still just under the peak of the early 80’s when I first started driving. If we could get rid of that lousy $0.41 we pay in taxes around here, I’d be happier.
Though, I’ve seen mention of the prices of other countries. I was in Spain a few years ago and it was something like ~120 pesetas/liter which worked out to almost $5 a gallon. IIRC, about 90% of that was tax (yeah… and I complain about 41 cents…)
Why not tap back into all the capped-off wells in Texas where there is still enough oil to run this nation by itself for years? Or is it still cheaper to pay OPEC $30+ a barrel than to pump the oil out of our wells?
Americans are too fat they should walk more. But not on the freeway.
Hey, if all Americans walked, they wouldn’t hafta worry about the freeway. Except for foot-traffic, which could hurt more than a car. Steel-toed boots. Ouch.
Nobody controls energy prices. OPEC can and does influence prices. But OPEC hardly knows solidarity; some of it’s members are notorious cheaters on production allocations. The overwhelming majority of wells drilled in this country are drilled by independents who can’t do diddily about the price.
Exploration and exploitation drilling are down in the U.S. and we are not replacing consumption with new reserves. The absolute bottom in oil prices came in December 1998 and the absolute low in working rigs (488) came in about April of last year. Drilling has improved since then, but it’s nowhere near past levels (when I went to work in the oil business in 1981, there were over four thousand rigs working in this country - that was an admittedly crazy time in the business - but what a difference; last week’s rig count was 760).
The improvement in price has not attracted drilling dollars, so activity remains low. Another ominous sign is the number of seismic crews working. Despite what “official” numbers you might see (~100+ last time I looked), I have been talking with seismic contractors the last few weeks and they estimate the true number of working crews is around 12. What makes this a bit worrisome is that seismic activity can be taken as a leading indicator, i.e., seismic work comes prior to wells being drilled. The thought there is that the increase in drilling activity since last April’s low is mainly drilling of inventory exploratory locations and exploitation locations being drilled to take advantage of the current price - that is to say, new exploratory locations are not being developed to an appreciable degree. Another tidbit on that score is the news that the only thing that saved the fannies of the more prominent seismic equipment manufacturers last year was a large acquisition by the Saudis of new equipment. What’s the lesson there? The Saudis know they need to find some more pretty soon.
And, besides our own increased consumption, the rest of the world’s consumption is only going to increase. Asia’s industrial revolution is trying to get under way and they appear to be recovering from their financial collapse of a few years ago at a clip no one really expected, so they’ll be competing with us for supply.
The price of a barrel will drop, and the traditional financing of the industry (private investment has driven lots of drilling, and those dollars are playing tech stocks or just don’t believe in grease hunting anymore) leaves it subject to wild swings. And there are indications that the March OPEC meeting may result in increased production. But the price of a barrel will go up again. And then there are the repeated mutterings from the White House (that just aren’t getting any respect in the marketplace) that they just might release reserves from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the market in order to bring prices down. The SPR is currently about 85% charged and could sustain our consumption, on it’s own, for about 90 days. Combined with our domestic production, we could sustain ourselves for about 150 days. It was created to shield us from disaster should foreign supplies disappear and would likely last longer as emergency conditions would exist in such a situation. Nevertheless, it’s use should not be to diddle with the market price, and there’s not enough there to truly tell the market where to go (am I imagining it, or do I work in just about the only industry that the government is constantly trying to hobble? You never see’em trying to negatively influence the price of wheat - well, let’s just not go to the schizoid approach to tobacco).
And, as has been pointed out above, the price of gasoline is positively cheap if you compare it over 10 or 20 years to any other consumer product. Unadjusted for inflation, the 20 year average price in this country is $1.46/gallon. That’s unadjusted for inflation.
So, what can Joe Citizen do about the price of gas? Probably not much. What you can do is minimize it’s effect on your life. Somebody above posted something to the effect of look to the 70’s and that’s close. The changes in automobiles and such that occured as a result of OPEC flexing it’s muscles in 1973 did minimize the effect on individuals lives. They *didn’t[/] bring gas prices down. Use a car that is efficient, use it efficiently, examine all your other usage of energy and minimize where possible.
Nukes, anyone?
*Wage and handy,
You obviously don’t live in So. Cal. (I wish I didn’t!) “Public transportation”? What’s that? The busses are often crowded and the trains don’t go to the West Side at all. I suppose I could catch a bus downtown, take the train to Long Beach, then have a car there to drive to work; but that would take a few hours. So. Cal. just wasn’t built for public transportation. And I’m not about to walk 43 miles to work and then another 43 miles back. Once I move north I’ll try to find a place that’s close to the office and that I can afford.
What should we do about rising gas prices?..uh…pay more? Really, before everyone gets bent outta shape and goes carpet-bombing Bedoin camps put your '69 'Cudda in the garage and take your Geo Metro to work.
Occam, you’re on beam.
Yep, we asked for this one in spades!