http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2007/gb20070720_223326.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe+index+page_top+stories
BusinessWeek - Oil: OPEC in Charge, $90 on the Way?
- Thread starter Inky_Wretch
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http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2007/gb20070720_223326.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe+index+page_top+stories
Football_Bat
Well-Known Member
They said the same thing last year and it was back around $55 at the end of August. Lack of hurricanes helped, of course.
chazp said:
Why not? $5.00 a gallon might force automakers and drivers to get serious about ways to reduce fuel consumption. It would be good for the enviroment and make us less dependant on the Middle East.
$90 a barrel would be the best possilble thing to happen.
slappy4428
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Yeah, but changes by the automakers wont happen overnight,.. in the short run, it's a crippler.Boom_70 said:
BitterYoungMatador2
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$90 a gallon might raise our mileage to, what? 35 cents a gallon?
Batman
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Boom_70 said:
This argument always pisses me off. Long-term, higher oil prices will spur interest in alternative fuels and make car companies increase gas mileage. Consumer demand will force it.
Short-term, it will absolutely, positively nuke our economy.
Not everybody lives in an area with good (or any) public transportation. At $5 a gallon, getting to and from work will cost a lot of lower-income people half their paychecks. Spending more money on gas means less on other things.
Even if they do live in big cities, and can get to or from work relatively cheaply, higher fuel costs are passed down every link in the economic chain. Look at what's happened already with food prices. It costs more for farmers to harvest crops, more to get the stuff to market, and more to buy it. In short, you end up with a recession because people can't afford to buy anything other than gas. Once it corrects itself, you get a nice case of inflation.
Anything over $3 a gallon makes it rough on the vast majority of Americans.
Batman said:
You really have to think of the greater good though. $5 gas in long term would be better for the country. People would adjust and mass transportation would get caught up. We would be free of our middle east dependency on oil.
Boom_70 said:
There have been too many decades of suburban sprawl and zero investment in public transportation in most of the nation. In Dallas, for example, public transportation is almost non-existant and people routinely have 45-60 minute commutes.
The Big Ragu
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We won't be free of our dependency on oil until we have an alternative fuel source that is cheaper. Even at $5 a gallon for gasoline, we wouldn't have that alternative. So yeah, it would be a disaster. And it probably isn't as simplistic as us needing "something to spur some good-old fashioned American innovation." The internal combustion engine didn't suddenly get invented because an economic need called for it exactly at that time. Things don't typically work that way. It was the right time because of technological know how. If things didn't work that way, by and large, we'd have robots doing all of our work and we'd be living in a Jetsons-like world. It isn't a matter of the will for that not being there. And it isn't a matter of us not wanting a cheap, plentiful fuel source either. There are plenty of smart people who would love to make that happen ... and haven't been able to.
J
jgmacg
Guest
So do we make a series of small, wrenching adjustments now - higher prices at the pump, mass transit bond issues, meaningful research into alternative fuels and technologies - and suffer the rotten economy and inflation in brief, but bearable, intervals?
Or do we stand pat and do nothing until the oil's gone?
Option 1 is uncomfortable.
Option 2 constitutes a global economic meltdown a lot of people - even in developed countries - wouldn't survive.
Or do we stand pat and do nothing until the oil's gone?
Option 1 is uncomfortable.
Option 2 constitutes a global economic meltdown a lot of people - even in developed countries - wouldn't survive.
Football_Bat
Well-Known Member
Glad they're putting the prison grounds to good use.Bubbler said:
Ethanol is a scam. There is no energy gain. Ethanol is politicians way of buying votes in the mid-west while simultaneously giving the implication that they are not in big oils pockets. That is it.
If our government was really serious about defeating terrorism, getting us off the oil addiction and saving the environment they would have set up a project equivalent to the Manhattan Project. We will be forced off our oil addiction out of necessity at some point but if we don't hurry our asses up we will face harsher and harsher consequences and a recession will be a cake walk compared to them.
If our government was really serious about defeating terrorism, getting us off the oil addiction and saving the environment they would have set up a project equivalent to the Manhattan Project. We will be forced off our oil addiction out of necessity at some point but if we don't hurry our asses up we will face harsher and harsher consequences and a recession will be a cake walk compared to them.
Batman
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Ethanol is worse than a scam, it's a disaster. Not only are you still using the same amount of energy to harvest all that corn, but you're also driving up food prices because more corn is going to ethanol than it is to cattle and people.
The problem with finding a cheap, plentiful energy source is that we've already found it -- oil. Sad as it is, there is nothing out there that's as efficient or as cheap as that. The internal combustion engine is a miracle of technology, right up there with anything mankind has ever produced. We can make the basic design more and more efficient, but there's not much on the horizon (or ever, for that matter) that's likely to be as cheap or as efficient as what we have now.
The more technology you throw at the problem, the more expensive it gets because costs for R&D and high-tech materials are passed on to the consumer.
Another problem with talk of "renewable" energy sources is that there's no such thing. One of the first things you learn in high school physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. There's a finite amount in the universe. You can convert it into different forms, and harness some for different uses, but you can't create it out of thin air.
So if you have electric cars, that's great. They don't pollute as much -- unless you factor in the power plants that have to work twice as hard to provide the juice for millions of cars. And even then, the technology we have right now just doesn't mesh with our way of life. Limited range, the difficulty of scaling up the technology for trucks and machinery, a lack of infrastructure and an aging electrical grid are just a few of the issues that need to be tackled before we're close to ready for this.
There are no easy solutions.
On the economic side, doubling the price of gas over 5 or 10 years might be feasible. Even though you'd have a crippling inflation rate, people and the economy would have time to adjust. We're starting to see this happen now, since we've doubled the price in the last three years.
Do it overnight, though, and you'd have a revolution in this country. Seriously.
I consider myself to make a comfortable living. Not great, but enough to pay the bills. When gas went from $2 to $3 a gallon over the course of a year, I definitely started to feel the pinch. That extra $50 or $100 that I used to have left over at the end of the month was suddenly going into my tank instead of a savings account. Now, imagine doubling that -- without the benefit of a pay raise or other source of income (which would also be likely to include more driving).
You end up with a lot of pissed off, broke, possibly cold (in the winter) people. And that's never good.
The problem with finding a cheap, plentiful energy source is that we've already found it -- oil. Sad as it is, there is nothing out there that's as efficient or as cheap as that. The internal combustion engine is a miracle of technology, right up there with anything mankind has ever produced. We can make the basic design more and more efficient, but there's not much on the horizon (or ever, for that matter) that's likely to be as cheap or as efficient as what we have now.
The more technology you throw at the problem, the more expensive it gets because costs for R&D and high-tech materials are passed on to the consumer.
Another problem with talk of "renewable" energy sources is that there's no such thing. One of the first things you learn in high school physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. There's a finite amount in the universe. You can convert it into different forms, and harness some for different uses, but you can't create it out of thin air.
So if you have electric cars, that's great. They don't pollute as much -- unless you factor in the power plants that have to work twice as hard to provide the juice for millions of cars. And even then, the technology we have right now just doesn't mesh with our way of life. Limited range, the difficulty of scaling up the technology for trucks and machinery, a lack of infrastructure and an aging electrical grid are just a few of the issues that need to be tackled before we're close to ready for this.
There are no easy solutions.
On the economic side, doubling the price of gas over 5 or 10 years might be feasible. Even though you'd have a crippling inflation rate, people and the economy would have time to adjust. We're starting to see this happen now, since we've doubled the price in the last three years.
Do it overnight, though, and you'd have a revolution in this country. Seriously.
I consider myself to make a comfortable living. Not great, but enough to pay the bills. When gas went from $2 to $3 a gallon over the course of a year, I definitely started to feel the pinch. That extra $50 or $100 that I used to have left over at the end of the month was suddenly going into my tank instead of a savings account. Now, imagine doubling that -- without the benefit of a pay raise or other source of income (which would also be likely to include more driving).
You end up with a lot of pissed off, broke, possibly cold (in the winter) people. And that's never good.
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