A running gag I had with “T” last night at the J&J dinner was to, every so often, do my best Homer Simpson angry voice and say, “Ooooh. I hate oil companies *so* much!” when someone was bagging on the evil oil companies. If it had been a drinking game to drink a beer and a shot, Clinton style, every time someone ragged on the oil companies, I’d probably still be in the hospital right now.
Sure, we have an energy problem and, sure, the oil companies are making money hand over fist right now, but it’s like the deal with the scorpion and the turtle. An oil company, like a scorpion, is what it is. You don’t especially blame the scorpion for stinging and you don’t especially blame the oil companies for trying to make big profits selling oil. With scorpions, you don’t blame them, but you do try to avoid them if you can and kill them if you can’t. I recommend a similar approach with oil companies.
but would that require more honesty that people are willing to accept?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-c_SxU4QrY
I don’t see how you can be pro-enviroment and anti-gas-price-gouging.
If you drive a 20 gallon to mile SUV and feel it is your God-granted right to drive to Chicago for $10, you’re twisted, but you’re at least consistant when you bitch about big oil.
However, those that understand global warming should see it as anything but good when the oil companies raise the cost of gas. Eventually, it will lower consumption and / or create alternatives.
I miss the preview feature.
That should read “see it as a good thing”.
The thing about Clinton’s speech last night was that she kept saying it wasn’t fair that oil companies charge what they do, and somehow we must make them sell it cheaper.
Last I checked, they’re selling a finite resource that took hundreds of millions of years to form. In the next few decades we will have burned most of that which is easily, cheaply obtained.
So what’s a fair price for such a useful, precious, limited commodity? Probably whatever price buyers and sellers are willing to agree to, which is currently about $3.50/gal for gas. I don’t really see what “fairness” has to do with it, other than that life is unfair because we can’t have cheap, endless quantities of things we desire. In the same sense, the prices for amusement park tickets and ponies are unfair.
Look around at what we, our friends, and our neighbors drive. Is it unfair that gas isn’t so cheap as to allow ourselves to without a second thought burn extra gallons needlessly in a 20 mgp vehicle when 50 mpg vehicles are available. Walking and peddling a bike are free. My Prius is costing me about $20/wk. to drive. I know–some people bought not knowing the price would do this. Because this is the first gas crisis *ever*, or something.
Yet Hillary thinks our failure to plan should somehow doesn’t constitute a crisis on the oil companies’ part. I don’t get it.
You go, Doug!
I mean, it’s not like the oil companies produce anything that people want.
And our national energy policy has been so well considered and executed for so long, our current issues can only be attributed to bad luck and/or evil oil companies.
And the ‘soak the oil companies’ policies worked out so well last time around.
And are you really advocating murder, or is your metaphor just terribly unfortunate?
She also wants to open the “strategic petroleum reserve”.
On the one hand, it could be useful to empty it at high prices and fill it at low prices.
However, Hillary assumes low prices are coming in a reasonable enough time to then refill it.
If you don’t refill it, then it is no longer a “reserve”, which would be very un-“strategic” of us. You see, that reserve exists to keep our nation functional for a few months should there be an actual, major disruption in supplies. “It costs more, so I’m mad/sad” doesn’t constitute such an instance.
She threw her balls up on the table for us to admire regarding Iran. Now do you think talking tough, sending a carrier to the Gulf, and generally rattling sabres makes a major disruption more, or less likely? It would be a shame if we lowered the reserve for a few months’ equivalent of a Wal-Mart sale on gas, only to have supplies dry up due to a Mideast crisis. That would be pretty unstrategic of us.
For the most part, oil companies do not own the oil they ship, refine, and distribute. I certainly do not understand the oil business, but does anyone know of another business that enjoys record profits after the price of its major input increases five fold? The Saudis, Nigerians, and Venezualans should be raking it in. But why the oil companies? That’s not a rhetorical question.
No mention of the windfall oil profits the federal government receives for producing absolutely nothing. Why does anything that produces a profit in this country have to be vilified by the left (except, of course, government)? Also not a rhetorical question.
I’ll repeat a joke I repeated on my blog three years ago:
Three guys are in a jail cell. They start to talking and find out that they’re all gas station owners.
The first one says, “I set my prices at a couple of cents higher than my competitors. I’m in here for price-gouging.”
The second one says “I set my prices at a couple of cents lower than my competitors. I’m in here for predatory practices.”
The third one says “I set my prices at the same price as my competitors. I’m in here for collusion!”
Markets produce what is a fair price. If we buy, it’s fair enough to have bought. If we fail to buy, the price goes down. If some one operator is truly gouging, especially because what they sell is a commodity that is virtually indistinguishable one to the next, chances are that operator will die a fast death. Have none of us ever noticed an abandoned gas station?
T- Thanks for mentioning failure to plan. That’s mainly what it comes down to, but because most people can’t be that honest about themselves, they’re happier having a government bully an industry that sells them a product they refuse to stop purchasing.
Mike Kole says
That capitolist truism really only works if a) there isn’t a monopoly and b) the item isn’t a necessity.
Along the lines of “T” above, the problem we have is that people believe that gas *is* a monopoly (in that they see no alternative product) and a necessity. We have to get out of that mindset.
This could be so easy, if we weren’t so stupid.
Think about how our country basically went from the V2 rocket technology to a man on the moon (and back home safely) in the span of about 15 years. We can do hard things.
I give mad props to the Prius, but it isn’t all it could be. Throw a lithium ion battery in it and you approach 100 mpg, but you still will be plugging it in. Yet as I speak, mine is baking in the sun while I’m at work all day. Why not have the roof be solar panels? You could even have a flexible solar array you could pull up from the dash as a sun shield, since the front windshield is so horizontal. If this were done, it would get infinite mpg on sunny days (or stuck in traffic in a lot of cities), and 50-100 mpg on cloudy days, and less in the winter. But this is technology we have right now, really.
Under current conditions, with troops in the Middle East, global warming, and terrorism, what are we to make of Buffy driving to the mall in her Eddie Bower Edition Ford Excursion? Is she stupid, or an ecoterrorist, or a fundraiser for terrorist states? Or all three? There are so many cases of conspicuous waste that it’s hard to feel to much sympathy for us at this point.
Maybe government should help peoples’ decision-making. Maybe phase in more gas taxes for autos, and more tax breaks for efficient vehicles. Exempt rail, trucking, shipping, and airlines maybe, because they’re about as efficient as they can be at this point. It’s not like trucking companies are choosing to not buy an 18-wheel Prius–such a thing just doesn’t exist.
There are certain things that will probably always need oil to run. Rail and airplanes come to mind. If we want to have these things far in the future, we should not be choosing Hummers, F250 pickups, or Excursions for our trips to the mall. We need to allocate precious resources in the smartest way possible.
And for those of us who have larger families; we’d love if the technology would reach the mini van/small suv market. I need something that seats six and my mini van unfortunately only gets 17 mpg.
Rev. AJB –
On the bright side, you can think of that 17 mpg as up to 102 PERSON miles per gallon, if you have a full load of folks.
Thus, the magic of car pooling!
Yeah-but four of my “car poolers” are deadbeats!
That’s a good illustration of a drawback of having four kids.
Part of scaling back on petroleum use, coal use, wood use, and decreasing greenhouse gases, etc., is scaling back on our fecundity a bit. If the response to decreasing energy costs or consumption by half, per capita, is to say, “Yay! We can have twice as many kids now!”, then we don’t really get anywhere, do we?
However, the technology will be reaching the SUV market, too.
I get this newspaper called “Farm Show”. It has articles about people who invent their own solutions to problems on their farms. One guy’s minivan’s engine died, so he put in an Isuzu diesel engine, and is getting 39 mpg highway now. That’s just some dude in a shop. I’m sure automotive engineers could do better.
The main drawback-in this case-is that the technology is out there to make a vehicle that will fit my family and still get 50 or so mpg. It just isn’t on the market right now.
When the premium for the technology becomes less than the gas savings, then sales take off and hopefully makers chase that market. For the Prius, the rebates are all gone so I overpaid by about $3k compared to earlier adopters of the technology. But my yearly fuel savings compared to the pickup truck I was driving is about $3k/yr, so it was a no brainer.
My guess is the premium for a more efficient mini-van is perceived to be too high to make it profitable yet. I think when gas hits $4, though, some of that changes. $3 seems to have been a threshold for causing a lot of bitching. $4 might actually radically change buying habits.
I saw a statistic that now 1/5 of all autos purchased are “compact” cars, up from a previous 1/8. At today’s prices, shouldn’t that number be more like 1/2, or 2/3?
Rev., what kind of minivan do you have that only gets 17? My wife’s Venture gets 23.5 in mixed driving. It gets 27 on the highway, loaded for the family vacation.
Gas at $3.50+ per gallon is going to do the trick in terms of changing people’s behavior. Hell, it already has! Sales of big SUVs and full size trucks are down significantly. For the first time in a decade, sales of cars are higher than sales of trucks.
The Prius is another great example. When the first gen Prius came out in ’97, oil was $10 a barrel and Toyota sold a couple thousand of them. Last year, Toyota sold over 150k of them. It is the one of the best selling cars in America.
People are driving a lot more than they used to. That has to change. High gas prices, while painful, are just the ticket to fix our gasoline addiction.
Short Term Memory.
The first time gas prices washed over $3 a gallon everyone freaked out – they started car-pooling, stopped purchasing SUVs, etc. Then it ebbed to below $3 for a while and all that went by the wayside. The next time it overflowed $3, there was significantly less shrieking. Now as it looks like it is rising to $4 you get the “CRISIS!” reaction again. It will eventually recede to around $3 and the next time it floods the $4 mark everyone will just shrug.
I predict that as long as it keeps easing us to new prices, there will be no overall change to habits.
IndianaGasPrices.com
The 3-year view of the chart illustrates the point I was trying to make.
It’s that boiling frog thing. If you dump him into boiling water, he’ll try to jump out. If you turn up the heat gradually, he won’t.
Even more than just a gradual gain, however, the ebb and flow gives us periods where we are happy with “well, it isn’t as bad as it was.”
Instead of just being slowly cooked frogs, we are manic-depressive slowly cooked frogs.
Hmm… I see another t-shirt coming on.
Buzzcut-I have a Chrysler Town and Country. Problem is it has a V-6. It also has a digital readout of gas mileage. Best I can get overall is 17.2. Sticker on it said it should have gotten closer to what you’re getting on your van. Something tells me that part of the reason is that most of the time it is filled with six of us.
I also have a Subaru Outback that gets about 25 mpg. When that car finally dies-who knows when-I will replace it with a hybrid or higher mpg vehicle.
T-I miss the old 1981 Honda Civic Wagon we used to have. That thing got 40 mpg back when gas was $0.75 a gallon. I remember $10 filling the thing up for two weeks worth of driving.
And since that time every progressive car I’ve purchased has gotten less mpg than the one previous. And it’s not that I’ve gone for the big suv or pickup truck, either.
Hell, *I* miss that old 1981 Honda Civic Wagon; and I was just a passenger.
That was a great car. Back in the 1980 gas freak-out, we got on about a 10 month waiting list for a silver one. A few months in, they had a green one, and we grabbed it up as the only car for our family of four, replacing a ’73 Pontiac.
I miss the manual transmission most of all. There was something manly about having to shift the gears!
What I don’t miss about it: the 4/40 air conditioning and the lack of power steering.
Interesting that you guys bring up your long lost Civic Wagon.
Do an internet search on that car. Look at its statistics.
You can’t buy a car like that anymore! 2000 lbs? 75 hp? Hell, they’ve got lawnmowers that weight more and have more power than that!
We forget that cars are a lot more powerful and substantial than they were even 15 years ago.
My 1991 Honda Civic is smaller and less a little less powerful than a new Honda Fit, a car Honda brought to America because the current Honda Civic got too big!
America 2008 is where even the economy cars are bigger than fullsize cars from the 1980s.
Rev. you get crappy mileage because your foot is too heavy. Slow down, dude.
I drive my fellow drivers crazy because I accelerate so slowly. It’s the key to those good mileage numbers.
I don’t see anybody slowing down to get better gas mileage.
You might have me there;-)