GOP: Do Something About Gas Prices NOW!

[Cain]

I hate to sound like a Republican here, but if gas prices are too high for you, then just go out and make more money. Whatever you do, do not drive a smaller car, take fewer trips, or travel at a more "fuel-efficient speed." The American lifestyle is non-negotiable.

 

[lomiller]

It may also depend on how tightly one wishes to define "foreign". In 2011, 24.7% of U.S. crude oil imports came from Canada—which was 1.86 times more than the next nearest supplier (Saudi Arabia), and was a greater percentage than the U.S. imported from the Persian Gulf nations combined (20.7%). Strictly speaking, crude oil from Canada is foreign—though as a long-time friendly ally, it perhaps is not the same kind of foreign as, say, Venezuela or Nigeria.

Something people tend to forget is that Canada imports almost as much oil as it exports. The amount it sells to the US is more a factor of transportation efficiency than available supply. It's cheaper to transport Western Canadian oil to the US and have eastern Canada import oil than it is to ship it internally.

 

[BenBurch]

I hate to sound like a Republican here, but if gas prices are too high for you, then just go out and make more money. Whatever you do, do not drive a smaller car, take fewer trips, or travel at a more "fuel-efficient speed." The American lifestyle is non-negotiable.

And whatever you do, don't go get a hybrid car! Those are so evil that GOP lawmakers want to tax them extra.

 

[Unabogie]

And whatever you do, don't go get a hybrid car! Those are so evil that GOP lawmakers want to tax them extra.

Wait, really?

 

[Cain]

And whatever you do, don't go get a hybrid car! Those are so evil that GOP lawmakers want to tax them extra.

Makes sense. Hybrids are a symbol of surrender.

 

[BenBurch]

Wait, really?

http://www.autoobserver.com/2011/03/congress-some-states-consider-creating-tax-on-miles-driven.html

And I recall South Dakota and Nebraska considered this about 4 years ago...

 

[Beerina]

You think people should be able to start a corporation but not register it with the state? People get all kinds of benefits from having a corporation. We can't be sued for our personal assets, we get all kinds of tax breaks. We can sue and protect our assets and our intellectual property in courts provided free by the state. Why is it somehow a grotesque corruption of freedom to make people register their business names before getting all this protection from that same state?

You can do business right now, with no license, as yourself. Lots of programmers do (IIRC that's what you do?). But if you mess it up, I can sue you and take everything you have.

Or is this concern for freedom only limited to oil conglomerates?

I'm not talking about a simple license (assuming the government isn't using licensing to restrict entry for the sake of it).

I'm talking about needing to get permission to build things. Massive environmental studies (vitally important, for some reason, to people in huge cities in New York and California, which would never have been built under such rules) perform the defacto same drag on the economy that corrupt nations with massive kickback requirements suffer.

Hence the absolute asininity of the king rubbing his chin and thumbing down on a pipeline.

Not in a free nation, sorry.

 

[Tony]

Not in a free nation, sorry.

You're right. In a free nation, you have to accept living in an environmental cesspool while those who got rich making it a cesspool have the funds to keep their environment from becoming a cesspool.

 

[Shalamar]

You're right. In a free nation, you have to accept living in an environmental cesspool while those who got rich making it a cesspool have the funds to keep their environment from becoming a cesspool.

It's the conservative way!

 

[KevinCanada]

GOP strategy is simple just blame Obama for everything. Their throwing poop on the wall to see how much of it they can get to actually stick.

That depend on texture consistency

 

[rcfieldz]

Ga$

Prices will go up when next global crisis arises. Taxes on gas fund conflicts.

 

[KevinCanada]

If they were really serious about finding an alternative and getting away from foreign oil, they would do this but it is almost impossible in American politics.

I never got how people can want us to be less dependent on foreign oil but at the same time want us to subsidize oil prices. If something is cheap, would you use more or less of it?

Getting away from oil is a will happen eventually. but to pull a major shift like that takes time.

use Cars. and say they go electric. The only problem they have is electricity storage, They can't get the batteries to hold enough charge.

It opens a big can of worms if they went electric.
Is there enough nuclear reactors?
- Infrastructure. It is adequate?
- Transferring of millions of jobs out of the oil sector into new careers

I can see a gradual shift over perhaps 2 to 4 decades from oil to electricity. Nothing in the next 5 to 10 years until the technology is worked out. The military, aircraft... all oil.

 

[KevinCanada]

Supply and Demand is why oil prices are going up. No amount of drilling will extract oil that isn’t there. Over the next 20 years the US will need to burn 200 billion barrels of oil to keep going the way it is. This is FAR larger (10X) than US reserves.

Investors drive up the cost also. A friend of mine sat and waited while the oil gas prices crashed and bought another $20,000 worth of shares. He said prices will go back up again, may as well enjoy the easy money.

you and I paid for that.....

 

[KevinCanada]

Something people tend to forget is that Canada imports almost as much oil as it exports. The amount it sells to the US is more a factor of transportation efficiency than available supply. It's cheaper to transport Western Canadian oil to the US and have eastern Canada import oil than it is to ship it internally.

The amount of oil coming to the states is going to increase sharply in the next few years.

There is still a snag or two in the USA, especially with Elections (suspect Obama is dragging his feet on it for popularity votes) regarding pipelines. Harper is fast tracking the assembly of oil lines in Canada by passing environmentalists. With his new founded majority government, no one can even shoot him down.

The oil sands are open to American companies for development also. it is a free for all for canadian buddies

 

[RandFan]

I'm not talking about a simple license (assuming the government isn't using licensing to restrict entry for the sake of it).

I'm talking about needing to get permission to build things. Massive environmental studies (vitally important, for some reason, to people in huge cities in New York and California, which would never have been built under such rules) perform the defacto same drag on the economy that corrupt nations with massive kickback requirements suffer.

Hence the absolute asininity of the king rubbing his chin and thumbing down on a pipeline.

Not in a free nation, sorry.

I used to belive this way and then I lived through the Northridge earthquake. A few deaths and a number of destroyed structures but nothing near what would happen in 3rd world countries.

Freedom doesn't mean doing anything you want. We live in a society and must consider the needs of everyone. I don't accept your characterization of Obama as a king. Especially since he had done' very little on behalf of left leaning interests when it comes to the environment, commerce and finance.

If Obama had acted in any way other than a moderate Republican I would still take issue with your assertions but it would not be so ironic. As it is, I really think it is wrong for you to do that. Rhetoric is fine but it ought to have some semblance of truth.

 

[RandFan]

...(suspect Obama is dragging his feet on it for popularity votes) regarding pipelines.

I just don't get this. I really don't. Most people on the left feel majorly stabbed in the back by Obama when it comes to environmental issues. I think it a bit naive or to fail to understand how those on the left that care about environmental issues view Obama. It's not good and this isn't going to help at all.

 

[davefoc]

Now, long term, political leadership can do EVERYTHING about gas prices. That is, if we funded the necessary nuclear power program, we could be synthesizing as much gas as we could use and the feedstock could be as carbon neutral as CO2 from the air and water.

Completely agree.

Does anybody have any numbers to back this up? In your estimates of the cost of syngas from nuclear power plants what interest rate did you use to estimate the capital cost of a gallon of synfuel from nuclear? How was the cost of nuclear accidents factored into your estimates of the cost of synfuel from nuclear reactors?

 

[davefoc]

Yes. It's simple supply and demand. Oil is fungible. It's not a commodity that can spoil. Transportation is a fraction of the overall cost. American producers are capitalists. They would be irresponsible to sell it at less than market cost.


http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg14/scaled.php?server=14&filename=worldgasprices.gif&res=landing

Yes, I'm sure that at any moment American oil producers are selling their oil at the highest possible price they can get.

But why does American gasoline than the gasoline in so many other places? Is it entirely due to higher taxes? My uninformed speculation was that the price of a gallon of US gasoline might be lower because American oil producers might not have full access to international markets. Maybe the requisite infrastructure or requisite political acceptability just doesn't exist to ship a barrel of oil from Texas to Europe or maybe American oil companies that are paying reduced rates on oil leases on federal lands might not be too enthused about opening up a mechanism to sell oil internationally and thereby suffer powerful criticism from people who want to keep oil prices low in the US.

I know that when talk went around about selling Alaskan crude to the Chinese a bunch of Republicans jumped up and complained proving again that the idea that Republicans favor free market ideas is often false.

At the heart, of this admittedly uninformed speculation, is a sense that people that drive cars in the US are subsidized by those that don't. When the government gets less than top dollar for an oil contract that means that people that drive cars get oil a little cheaper, oil companies make more money and people that don't drive cars suffer a loss because the government failed to get top dollar for an asset that they as citizens are part owner of.

Of course the people that suffer this the most are poor people from countries like Venezuela. Probably Chavez's base of support is based significantly in the poorer sections of the country and yet his policies with regard to this are wildly against their interest since so many of them don't own cars.

 

[BenBurch]

Does anybody have any numbers to back this up? In your estimates of the cost of syngas from nuclear power plants what interest rate did you use to estimate the capital cost of a gallon of synfuel from nuclear? How was the cost of nuclear accidents factored into your estimates of the cost of synfuel from nuclear reactors?

Nuclear power costs about $3380/kilowatt capacity in a study that was attempting to roll in those factors. Fuel cost is about 0.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. 30 year lifespan means plant cost per kilowatt-hour is 1.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, so adding you get 2.0 cents per kilowatt-hour. Operating costs 1.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, so 3.4 cents per kilowatt-hour all told.

It's going to take some more research to know how much air fuel synthesis will cost when developed, but it is being developed;

http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/

Assuming it is only a 25% efficient process, probably too pessimistic by half;

Gasoline is around 33.7 kilowatt-hours per gallon, so 33.7 * 4 = 135 kilowatt-hours.

135 * 3.4 cents = $4.60/gallon.

Quite competitive and will become moreso.

And you have to factor in the security costs for the nation too. We spend a lot of money keeping middle-eastern oil flowing. We could tell them to go to hell if we had this.

 

[davefoc]

Nuclear power costs about $3380/kilowatt capacity in a study that was attempting to roll in those factors. Fuel cost is about 0.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. 30 year lifespan means plant cost per kilowatt-hour is 1.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, so adding you get 2.0 cents per kilowatt-hour. Operating costs 1.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, so 3.4 cents per kilowatt-hour all told.

It's going to take some more research to know how much air fuel synthesis will cost when developed, but it is being developed;

http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/

Assuming it is only a 25% efficient process, probably too pessimistic by half;

Gasoline is around 33.7 kilowatt-hours per gallon, so 33.7 * 4 = 135 kilowatt-hours.

135 * 3.4 cents = $4.60/gallon.

Quite competitive and will become moreso.

And you have to factor in the security costs for the nation too. We spend a lot of money keeping middle-eastern oil flowing. We could tell them to go to hell if we had this.

Or you could just use cars with batteries and do quite a bit better I think. At 4 miles per KWh the fuel cost for an electric vehicle is less than a penny per mile (using your estimate of the cost of nuclear power which I was skeptical about since it is less than what anybody pays in the US) versus something like 12 cents a mile for a reasonably fuel efficient car with gas at $4.00 a gallon.

Still, this wonderfulness is not without issues. Evaluating the cost of nuclear disasters is difficult when they occur so seldom. Probably somebody in Japan estimated the cost of nuclear disasters at something close to zero and now Japan has shut down all their reactors and may or may not restart them. And the old what to do with spent fuel question looms a bit. Of course, there are viable solutions but is there the political will to implement even one of them?

This isn't to say I don't favor nuclear development, I just don't know. It's probably safer than coal which is guaranteed to destroy mountains and create massive pollution even without factoring in the CO2 issue which I tend to believe is important.

It's really too bad, at 62 I'm afraid I'm too old to see how this shakes out and I'm curious about it. Maybe if I lost some weight and improved my life style I could hang on to 90 and I might have a feel for what the long term solution is before my demise. And then again maybe we'll erupt in to major civil unrest and I won't have learned anything except humans are a violent unpredictable group which I already knew.