Category: Energy & Gasoline Prices

Everything you’ve heard about fossil fuels may be wrong

“Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?”

Read more from Michael Lind at Salon.com and have your preconceptions challenged.

News that tells you nothing

It is difficult to understand why newspaper editors think that their typical readers have more time to evaluate the truth of politicians’ claims [than] reporters who have a full time job to do such things. However [this] seems to be a widely held view, since so often articles are devoted to telling us what the politicians claim without including any effort to uncover what is true.

Today’s he said/she said in the Post and the NYT is about high gas prices. The Democrats are looking to take back tax breaks from the oil industry while the Republicans are pushing to “drill here, drill now.” It would have been useful to include a bit of analysis so that readers could judge the likely impacts of the two policies.

Dean Baker at Beat the Press goes on to provide the analysis, as he often does.

Remember the over-under on gasoline prices?

Sixteen days ago I said I would bet that gasoline would be $5 a gallon by Memorial Day.

Well, I got a message from Karen in the San Francisco area today. She wrote:

“Just to keep track of things….I paid $4.03 at the pump today.

“And then I barfed.”

Just dry heave levels here in ‘Burque: $3.38.

The national average is $3.52.

Dim bulbs

“A trio of House Republicans, Joe Barton and Michael Burgess of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, which would repeal the section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that sets minimum energy efficiency standards for light bulbs and would effectively phase out most ordinary incandescents.”

Green Blog — New York Times

Sad and most aggravating line of the day

“Video from the sea floor has once again exposed as ludicrous the federal estimates of how much oil is poisoning the Gulf of Mexico. That video shows that the billowing cloud of filth from BP’s broken pipe appears undiminished even as about 15,000 barrels of oil a day are being captured by a new cap, clearly indicating that the flow is several multiples of that amount.”

Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

How low will it go?

Oil is under $40 a barrel at the moment. There’s no reason to think gasoline won’t soon be under a buck a gallon, in some places at least. You can get regular for $1.27 a gallon in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Is this good news or bad news?

[Update: I don’t recommend driving to Cheyenne to buy gas. It just seems to have the lowest price in the country at the moment.]

Blame Ike

Wholesale — that’s wholesale — gasoline hit $4.85 today, up from $3 Tuesday because the refineries in southeast Texas are closed and aren’t making any gasoline for now.

That’s wholesale — four-eighty-five a gallon.

But the price of crude oil is down to near $100 you say. How can that be?

Because the southeast Texas refineries are closed. They aren’t buying any crude oil because they aren’t using what they have because they aren’t making any gasoline.

Gasoline price status report

According to AAA, the cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline nationwide averages 10.8% less than the record high price in mid-July.

The price today is still 30% higher than it was a year ago.

Average for unleaded regular September 11, 2008: $3.671.

The price of a barrel of crude oil is down 31% since July.

HOWEVER, this from AP:

The wholesale price of gasoline ranged from $4 to nearly $5 a gallon at the U.S. Gulf Coast on Thursday, said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, N.J. That was up significantly from about $3 to $3.30 a gallon on Wednesday, Kloza said.

“We’re looking at the highest wholesale prices ever for a huge swath of the country,” he said. “People understand that regardless what happens with Ike, it’s going to shut down the biggest refining cluster for a period of five, six, seven days.”

The wholesale price of gasoline is what refineries charge retailers. Retailers then mark up those prices for the customer so they can make a profit — so if these wholesale prices hold, it could mean that pump prices for U.S. drivers easily break through the July 17 record of $4.114 a gallon.

This and that

School starts this week in Albuquerque — Wednesday is the first full day. NewMexiKen never started school before Labor Day and none of my kids did either. What’s with this August-to-May school year anyway?

I bought regular gasoline yesterday for $3.58 (I’m rounding off the tenth of a cent from now on). I was thinking I shouldn’t fill up (that is, I should buy short), because the price will continue to drop at least until election day.

What percentage of time during the Olympic coverage on NBC is actually spent watching athletes do athlete stuff? 10 percent? 15 percent?

There are rumors that McCain will pledge just one term to offset the age issue. I know an even better way — no terms. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch tells us Why McCain would be a mediocre president. “A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job. His resume is much thinner than most people think.” Amazingly, McCain is even more of a dilettante than W.

Remember my rant about Comcast and the comment from a representative of Comcast? Well, it seems the outreach is real:

From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck’s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.

“When you’re having a two-way conversation, you really get to clear the air,” Mr. Eliason said.

The New York Times has more — Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear.

The iPhone is great except for battery life, which is OK at best.

Suburbs are done for

James Kuntsler, author of The Long Emergency (written when oil was $50 a barrel), is not what you’d call an optimist.

Here’s Kuntsler in the Schnectady Gazette:

A lot of people (Realtors, builders, bankers) are waiting for the “bottom” of the housing crash, with the idea that we’ll re-enter an up-cycle. I see it differently. There won’t be a resumption of “growth” as we’ve known it, certainly not in suburban residential and commercial real estate. The suburban project is over. We’re done with that. (I know people find this unbelievable.) The existing stuff will represent a huge liability for us for decades to come as it loses value and utility and falls apart.

And here he is in the Dallas Morning News:

I think the Sun Belt generally is in for tough times. We’re going to rediscover why the territory between Charleston and the Pecos was an agricultural backwater before 1945, with few cities of any size. You can’t overestimate the importance of cheap air conditioning – and the prospect for that is looking pretty grim in years ahead.