Haven’t we had oil at $100 a barrel before, and not that many years ago? And yet fuel and energy prices were lower.
It’s almost as if the price the consumer pays has absolutely nothing to do with cost.
Yeah, but how are they supposed to keep record profits when their costs are so high. /s
Don’t forget, next year they need to hit 104% the amount they did this year. Crank up the prices!
It’s actually pretty well correlated once you remove state taxes, which have increased significantly in some states like California. Mississippi gas, for example, is cheaper now than 2010, with respect to crude prices and discounted for inflation.
Gas was $100 a barrel under Bush. It was like $2 a gallon.
Dad said “Jesus criminey were not going anywhere for a week!”
V.V I paid 3.75 a gallon 3 days ago.
I remember seeing $5/gal under Bush. His last year had an average of $3.30 and peaked over $4… https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gasoline-prices-fared-under-last-190000869.html
I imagine everything else became more expensive too, labor, shipping, processing, etc
Good! Make it $1000 a fucking barrel! Any developed nation who genuinely cares about the health of their economy will be highly motivated to get all the way off of oil.
It’s been fluctuating in and out of triple digits for many years now. The price is manupulated by those who profit the most. Never so high that we panic away from oil, but always high enough for record profits. Fuck oil.
I want it $1000 a barrel just because of all the train lines it would build. The first time I saw gas get over $5 I was in LA and they very quickly approved the new extensions people are enjoying today.
As much as I would absolutely love us shifting from fossil fuels, it also needs to be practical. Suddenly increasing the price of gas doesn’t work for rural areas like the one I live in where your car is immensely important to you being able to get to the store or your job and we’re not in areas that public transport would be considered due to how small and spread out the towns are. And a lot of us don’t have the option to move closer to the cities and the transit opportunities either due to our jobs or just the cost of living required for the city versus our rural homes. We NEED to start working on infrastructure that doesn’t only have large cities in mind, but also us on the outskirts of the city or the rural communities will become even poorer than they are now when they have to pay a small fortune just to travel to the store or their jobs.
Oh no! If only we had some other means of creating or storing energy, if only there was a way to rid us of the dependency of oil!
Nuclear?
Everything else has a huge dependency on environmental factors (wind, sunlight, water) or storage resources which are harmful to scale up without safety consideration.
That’s a convenient sound bite that really ignores actual data on renewables.
The actual data on renewables is impressive, but not nearly impressive enough to stop climate change…as.anyone can see who is paying attention to the emissions data.
Renewables still greatly depend on fossil fuels as a backup power and thermal power source, which is why fossil fuel companies are promoting renewables-only to the masses.
It ensures society remains dependent on fossil fuels for the next decades, albeit at a lower intensity. Which works out very well for them, since they already passed peak production and just want to sell the remaining stock as long as possible for the highest price.
Once we crank up a few hundred nuclear reactors to serve as the backup for renewables and as a thermal energy source for producing synthetic hydrocarbons, then fossil fuels will become obsolete.
Until then, we’re going to be partly dependent on fossil fuels and pay a hefty price for them.
Renewables are highly volatile and storage technology isn’t there yet for most large grids. Right now that stability must come from coal, LNG, or nuclear, with some exceptions like geothermal. Pick your poison. China is building 5-10 giant new coal plants per year to satisfy this demand, despite being one of the cheapest places in the world to manufacture solar panels and turbines. If we care about the environment, we’ll choose nuclear. Germany’s “green” party has successfully lobbied to effectively end nuclear support in the country, and now they have to significantly increase coal and lignite consumption following the Russian LNG embargo.
I don’t understand why nuclear has to be a dirty word. Modern reactors are clean and safe. Far better for the environment than coal and LNG.
Nuclear should absolutely be part of the picture. That being said, nuclear does a bad job scaling up for peak demands over base load. Better than solar or wind for sure but not good enough. For a fossil fuel free world we do need energy storage. Luckily pumped water energy storage is pretty viable.
OPEC cartel succeeding in doing what cartels do
We need to get off fossil fuels ASAP, we also should probably wean away from car centricity, it’s making us dependent on these oil cartels. They have an oligopoly and they can just yank the prices up if they want and screw over everybody else.
