Gasoline prices: the end of an era. - Page 8  

Wait until the Chinese start to buy more cars, then the price will be even higher. I probably will need to buy a new car next year, and the hybrid vehicles start to be very attractive. At first, I want to buy the Maxima....but the 250 hps engine might really hurt my wallet.

Your statement that SUVs produce virtually no emissions is so completely and totally wrong it is practically hilarious - and someone was bound to call you out on that.

A few years ago that "responsible car maker" Audi ran an ad campaign in the UK alluding to the (emissions) cats in their cars producing "The gas that makes fizzy water, well, fizzy".
Of course they were forced to yank it after howls of protest, got a serious telling-off from from our Advertising Standards Authority and...not a lot.

Carbon Dioxide is a major greenhouse gas.
Fuel-inefficient vehicles produce a lot more Carbon Dioxide - it is an inevitable fact: that's how the cats work with a petrol engine.
All we need to argue about is what level of contribution cars are producing to global warning - and it isn't a totally black and white position: it is perfectly possible to enjoy the benefits of, and contribute to society - but not be unnecessarily wasteful.
It's a philosophy

Aircraft are different - in our world they are the only practical way of spanning the globe quickly...the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
About time the government taxed jet fuel tho'...

As pointed out by posters more eloquent than me, in the end market forces will determine the solution.

The way I like to look at it is to just divide the total daily oil use in the US by the number of people. That basically covers everything: plastics, industrial lubricants, product transportation, farming... everything. (You can add in an additional amount too to cover imported goods if you like.)

It basically works out to every man, woman, and child in America using 26 barrels of crude every year. Knowing this is useful because you can see the impact that rising crude prices have on people. So basically, the rise in price of crude from $25 to $65 increased the cost of living of every American by $1040. That includes driving as well as everything else behind the scenes: plastics, farming, etc. For an average family (2.5 people), the cost of living has increased by $2600/yr just because of crude.

The median household income in the US is $43k before tax; probably around $35k after tax (not sure on the exact after tax number). Anyway, that means that a $2600/yr increase in the cost of living because of crude means a 7.4% drop in an average household's after tax budget. That's a lot, but it doesn't sound all that critical yet, I guess. Let's just hope the price of oil doesn't go higher.

Paradoxically, we're worse off than China and Europe and developing countries because we're richer. So we can afford to pay higher prices for longer, and delay making sensible choices for longer. In the longer term, of course, these delays will hurt our economic competitiveness. Economies that use more oil per person simply won't be as competitive in the coming global marketplace. China is fortunate because they'll be forced to make better choices now, just as Japan did in their poverty after the second world war, which helped them weather the two earlier oil shocks much better than the US.

Oh come ON people.

Gas is not that expensive right now.

It's cheap compared to what it was in the early 80s. It's roughly comparable to both before then and after.

Stop thinking in nominal dollars. Nominal cost is not important. Real cost is what you should be looking at, and from that perspective gas is definately not outrageously expensive at all.

In fact, the real cost of gas as % of disposable income had been going steadily downwards until the late 90s, and even now it has only gone up a little bit. Still very very cheap compared to any time more than a decade or so ago.

This is just not true any more. No one is thinking in nominal dollars. On Friday the price of crude passed the inflation-adjusted average price of crude in 1981 (the highest it ever was):
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/I...ices_Table.asp

What we haven't reached yet is the peak daily price of crude in 1980 and 1981, but that absolute peak price only lasted for a few months. The price shot up quickly, stayed high for a short time, then went down again relatively quickly. The current situation is different and possibly more serious, because crude has stayed high for longer, and because of the demand situation there is little real prospect of oil prices suddenly starting to decline rapidly, as they did post-1981.

Maybe marketing other energy solutions to the people in power should not be done on the premise of the pollution but saving the economy from high energy prices.

Frankly, short of super-regulating (i.e., nationalizing) the market, doing a massive refinery build, and dumping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, there is no short-term solution to this problem. Even when prices fall, the specter of another crisis will loom in the wings.

We need to tough this one out, vote with our wallets to say that these prices (whatever the root cause) are unacceptable, and support funding for alternate energy research and implementation. Devoting our full attention to the matter, we got to the moon in less than ten years. I don't think a 2025 target for substantially reduced (i.e., >60%) oil dependency is impossible. (I doubled the timeframe. Our national moxie isn't what it once was. I blame a decrease in castor oil usage. )

Just uncomfortable.

such dependencies are merely replaced anyway. As the dollar pressures people to make different choices things will change. I'm not quite as worried about it as I used to be, and it doesn't help that all of these alarmists are freaking out at the 67 dollar crude oil peak. They should have been much more frightened when the projection of crude oil was changed from 50 to 80 dollars to 50 to around 110 - i think it was - by the end of the year.

67 dollars hah! Not quite enough to give up my 26 dollar a month insurance, 16 mpg '75 skylark; not even close (course I don't drive very much).
What's the worst that can happen? Mad Max?
or just not buying a new car and saving 30k for three years of gas.
Half the guys I met in portland don't drive anywhere, they are too smart to deal with the ****** traffic and gas prices.

What's the best that can happen? people abandon the car and we all ride on rails and bikes like the japanese and hippies(term used extremely loosely) want?
Neither will happen very soon. Its much more likely that terrorists will set off a nuke long before that and people will be glad to give up their freedoms (gross-tangent/digression).

Sure Americans are gross over-users, but we were born into it: a product of freedom to choose irresponsibility, loads of money, a lack of accountability and advertising.

Apparently (or so i'm told far too often) to be admired by the rest of the world.

So what's really going to happen? the idea my broker put up is that the gas prices will get so high that two hour commutes for the highest paying jobs will cripple the hundred mile radius suburbs and turn dollars back to the individual communities, but that sounds far too utopian to me
Don't you think that most of the middle class will just be a lot poorer, without computers and whatnot? more interesting to me is how it will affect the consumption and pricing of plastics: everything is freakin' plastic.

I honestly think education is a far more important topic to discuss as we might be able to do something about it (kill the president) instead of just last out at rapid consumerism which we are contributing to by buying headphones made out of plastic.

**** the average income in oregon is less than 22k (i'm pretty sure) and gas is like 2.60 for regular (about thirty cents below Southern California i think).
Humans will adapt, i'm fairly certain of it; they just need a new ad-campaigne and a star to lead her by.
That's one of the only bonuses to living in our society, if enough idiots want something (apparently only 48% is enough), it will happen.

for review I repeat, projected maximum for oil is 110 a barrel (well, just below) by the end of the year. Merry Christmas. The three drops of oil in your kids tonka truck will probably result in mass riots at Toys R Us for stealing the plastic playsets to buy up to sell on ebay before they realize no one gives a crap.

Of course, it would be a much more interesting way for a society to crumble than via the patriot act or the too often predicted nuclear winter.
What a joke.

I have obsereved that saving isn't easy unless you lived through the great depression.
If it was, so many of us intellectuals (clearly) wouldn't be here "saving" money by doing research on which headphone to buy instead of just shelling the dollars.

Hell, now that I think about it, this society is a lot more interesting than the puritan ****fest that resulted in an artistic dark age during this countries birth. Sodom and Gamorrah? just give it some more time.

Seems obvious to me that the trillion (bazillion?) dollar car industry, oil and government love triangle will just adapt as they see fit with legislation, and we will follow. Can't get blood from a stone.

Seems much more like a beginning than an end to me, course I hardly every say anything that optimistic, and I did advise my mother not too move too far away as gas prices would soon far outweigh a lower rent.
I weeped for remote responsibility via education long before this oil "crisis".

I dunno where that was going obviously, but it was rather entertaining to scrawl. I even proofread some of it. Good luck making any sense of it.

Amen to that! I agree 100%.

I can totally see the return of the individual communities happening.

When filling up the gas sucking beast and trucking down to Super Wal Mart for groceries, starts to cost more than the local guy selling his crops at the farmers market, it will happen.
The big super-center stores have all their goods moved by truck, from great distances and you know they will certainly pass the cost on to the consumer.
Not a totally bad thing, at least the food will be fresher.

This is so outrageous!!!

Here in Puerto Rico, last Friday, you can get gas for 52 cent/liter/regular, 58 cents/liter/premium. Next day they put it at 58 cents/liter/regular, 65 cents/liter/premium that translates to $2.19 per gallon/regular, $2.46 per gallon/premium.

Six cents in less than a day.

I think we will have to agree to disagree here. I am not totally wrong and if I am I ask you again: why have the censors and computer technology that regulates and controls emissions in all of today's vehicles (not just SUV's but sedans with the same V6 and V8 engines)? Why have smog tests where the level of emissions is measured by the emissions in the exhaust output and must meet governmental and EPA standards?
Methane is a major greenhouse gas too and I don't hear anyone up in arms about the termites.
Air travel is no different and depending on who's looking at it could also be argued in the same way. SUV is the best way for me to take my family to Disneyland or camping quickly and I don't want to hear about the stupid mini-vans because you could not have a family in it and pull a 22 footer up the mountain!
I wont even get into the global warming lie but it's pure BS!

Look the bottom line is that we are making vehicles run cleaner and cleaner as we progress. I don't like the gas prices either, it costs me $60 to fill up my truck! I can think of a number of solutions but respecting the no politics rule on head-fi I will leave it out. Maybe we just need a Doc Emmit Brown to install Mr. Fusion in every vehicle

You're lucky, we're paying approx $1.10/litre out here.

Perhaps it's because termites are not man made?

Ohhhh... I see so it only maters if it's our fault. got it thanks for the help