BTW, Squarebubble1, if you’re really interested in this subject, check out the writings of James Howard Kunstler, in particular The Long Emergency. (Article-length abridgement/summary here.)
According to the UK Automobile Association, the average petrol (gas) price today is £1.06 ($2.14) per litre. I make that $8.10 per US gallon.
It’s certainly hurting some people a lot, especially since people in rural areas tend to earn less. But you have to bear in mind that the average car engine is less than two litres over here - that does make some difference. If you have a 1.3 litre Ford Ka, fuel prices aren’t likely to be that big a deal unless you drive a bazillion miles a week.
No, we can’t, because some of those currencies are going into the toilet much faster than the greenback, or are used in countries experiencing higher across-the board inflation. There may also be countries using dollar-linked currencies which are in a similar situation to the UK, where taxes account for most of the price of fuel (it was more than 80%) - that automatically flattens out a lot of the price escalation. There’s more to fuel prices than the dollar.
Yeah - chalk it up to a B- math student.
Good reference source - thanx.
I thought this fit the criteria…hey I’m new at this- slack, please
Which currencies are those? The USD is falling against the EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, CZK, AUD, KWD, AED, SGD and many, many others… even the Indian Rupee. Sure, the Zimbabwe dollar is worse then the US one but that is hardly a standard to be proud of.
I for one am no longer keeping money in USD… within 2 weeks the rest of my USD savings will have been transferred out of the country.
I don’t watch the markets but according to this the Rupee and the Won are both falling relative to the USD. I suppose it depends a lot on which figures you are tracking.
What do you think will be the moment that would make it so all this cheap, obtainable energy? Will it simply be the price, technology, percentage of profit, something else?
The ‘cheap’ attainable energy comes from middle-eastern oil. It’s the cheapest to get out of the ground and refine. There are no cheaper sources of mass energy, nor are there likely to be.
What there are, however, are alternatives at higher price points. Right now, at 100bbl, there are several alternatives that are cheaper - hydro, nuclear, natural gas, coal, even wind. However, some of them are not really expandable (we’ve run out of really good locations for hydro, for example), and some are bad greenhouse gas emitters, and therefore people are shying away from huge investment in them (coal), and some are ensnared in regulatory burdens and NIMBY problems (nuclear). Others, such as wind and solar, aren’t currently up to the task of replacing core base-load energy sources because they aren’t reliable and widespread enough.
However, as prices of oil continue to increase, these alternatives look more and more attractive. If oil generated power costs 7 cents per kW/h, and nuclear costs 4.5, the marginal differences may not be enough to warrant billions of dollars of new investment and increased liability exposure and the other drawbacks of nuclear. On the other hand, if oil generated power costs 20 cents per kW/h, then the alternatives become hugely valuable, and more investment money and development effort will flow into them.
So we’re not going to suddenly wind up with cheaper energy than we have now (barring some major breakthrough). What we will wind up with is a diverse mix of more sustainable energy, at similar or slightly higher cost. My guess is that all of these other sources will find niches in the market, and we’ll moved to a more diversified energy infrastructure, probably using electricity as the main source of power for things that today are powered by oil, gas, and coal. By converting to electricity, you decouple of the energy creation infrastructure from the energy consumption infrastructure, which will allow us to change the mix of energy sources dynamically as prices rise and fall, and to more easily inject variable sources like wind and solar into the infrastructure.
We already are sinking trillions into alternative energy. Also, you have to account for inflation. The price of oil drives up the price of everything, so it depends on what the price of oil is relative to income. If Oil is 1000 a barrel but the poverty line is 75,000 per year, it doesn’t mean that much.
Tar sands and heavy oil have been mentioned, but what about the “oil shales”? In the USA, the Green River formation is estimated to contain more oil than Saudi Arabia. The cost of extraction is pretty high-anyone know if any new techniques have ben developed?
The last cool attempt I saw involved drilling a whole bunch of shafts into the shale, injecting pressurized steam into them, waiting for the oil to seep out of the shale, and the sucking it up while leaving the shale mass largely undisturbed. No strip mining required. I think Shell had an experimental field going with this technique, but I don’t know how it’s worked out.
Ah, I forgot that Americans had smaller gallons: here 1 gallon is 4.5 litres for an American price of US$9.63
Who’s “we”? Trillions of what, cents? What are you including under the rubric of “alternative energy”? In summary: cite?
There will be a tipping point were we will not accept the price increases any longer. I think the Saudis and other Middle east countries are aware of this. The tipping point in my opinion is $4.00. Reach that point in middle america and start ducking middle east.