I had a hard time looking at gas prices in Saudi Arabia. 95 hallalas. Which equals about 20 cents a gallon.

Some refineres were closed during the 90ties. Imagine if we still had them or more?

the EPA has strict guidelines for building a refinere on US Soil. How strict? If the Panama canal was to be built today, with current EPA laws it would NOT be built.

There is a HUGE deposit of oil in Colorado which is known as shale. Oil mixed with sand. There is so much of it it would make the oil from the middle east look like a puddle next to lake. Now if they could fine a way to refine that cheap enough..... hmmmm.

Anyways, they may just need to drill in just more than FL to bring the price down.

 

f the fish.. lol j.k. where in fl did they find oil?

 

is this the same as they do in canada? if i remember right the cost of that dirt oil is around 3 buck a gallon.. i wouldnt mind that over the 4.13 im paying now for my s.

 

The gulf of Mexico.

There's tons down there.

 

don't challenge me ... but if you were to ... i think we could get City Walk to sponsor it!

and to truly answer that ... no i wouldn't feel differently. I'm perfectly fine with the current pricing and the factors which affect it. I have reduced my consumption of all petroleum-based products and price is but one of the concerns. If gas does reach $20 a gallon then I will proudly dust off the bicycle and enjoy the benefits of excercising while getting from point to point in the more suburban areas. Heck ... i may even become so healthy that drinking won't be important enough anymore ... crazy-talk ... i know. I'm sure if enough people follow that premise then the gas-companies will feel the 'pinch' and have to make some sort of adjustment. One company may even try to reduce it's end-pricing just to stand out from the rest. And then another company will notice and lower their price too. And so on ...

There are many 'leveling' factors to pricing. Drilling in the Gulf may be one of them.

 

AGREED

 

and this is one reason our economy is in the hole...

i do agree with you in some parts and yes... drilling in the gulf will help start this up to level out these prices.

last i heard was $140 a barrel now? correct?

 

I voted no...not because we don't need the oil, but because America is addicted to oil like a crack addict is addicted to the little rock. Drilling is at best a stop-gap measure which feeds that addiction, like an enabler lending money so an addict can score.

The root cause for increased gas prices is the increased demand created by the growth in the Chinese and Indian economies and, to a lesser extent, the other economies in Southeast Asia. Those economies are growing to satisfy the needs of their growing populations. The competition for oil is what is driving up prices. If America drills without any decrease in its demand for oil, it does not seem reasonable to assume that oil prices will drop or that there will even be a slowdown in the rate of their increase.

What will happen if oil prices increase? As they do, it will create a disincentive for people to live in suburban residential communities. People will be forced to located in more dense multi-family residential communities. This will create a disincentive for people to use their cars to commute. I could even see municipalities following the former London plan of charging commuters each day for the privilege of bringing cars into a central city center. It is critical that we get people to relocate from suburban settings to downtown cores or urban nodes.

Curtailing or eliminating federal grants to state and local governments which underwrite and subsidize road construction would also help to curtail demand. The federal government could then redirect those federal dollars--or a substantial portion of them--to rehabilitating municipal infrastructure to accommodate the redevelopment of core urban areas.

Remaining as an unresolved issue is an equitable scheme of tax incentives and disincentives designed to promote the purchase of fuel efficient and clean cars. A two pronged approach can address this issue.

Currently, the Internal Revenue Code has allowed favorable depreciation rates for vehicles over a set gross vehicle weight. At the same time, the Code has previously provided tax credits for hybrid electric vehicles. These ends are inconsistent: favoring the purchase of gas guzzliers while proding people to buy economical cars. A better system would be to establish an annual excise tax--to be phased in over a period of years and to be applied to new vehicles--which taxes consumers based on vehicle fuel economy. There are no absolutely accurate or fool-proof ways to totally and completely estimate fuel economy, but E.P.A. gas estimates could serve as a starting metric. Fuel inefficient cars could be taxed while efficient cars might escape any tax or even receive a tax credit.

As another component of that excise tax, owners could be annually taxed based on the C02 emissions of their cars, say based on the amount of grams of C02 emitted per kilometer or mile travelled. The E.U. already does this, and given the multinational nature of vehicle production this is not an insurmountable obstacle for car manufacturers. Again, this would need to be phased in so that consumers and manufacturers could adopt to the new regimen.

 

Isn't that because it was assumed vehicles over the gross weight were most likely to be "commercial" vehicles not purchased by corporations but still used for a family business such as a farm truck? I think it's only in the last 10 years or so where uber heavy weights such as Hummers and Suburbans have become "mainstream" transportation.

 

You're right. But it seems to make little sense to encourage to purchase of fuel efficient hybrids by tax policy without using that same tax policy to discourage the purchase of fuel inefficient vehicles.