Six Ways to Cut Gas Prices Forever

Hank - The drilling offshores deal has to be controlled by the national government due to the regions they’re going to be drilling in. Depending on how you decided to project out the state lines into the oceans, you’d run into issues in the carolinas where they’re going to be drilling. But thats moot anyways, the seas off the states do not belong to the state governments, they are governed by the national government. I think if its going to impact a state, they’d need a say in it, but I mean, saying its a state issue is not going to work here.

Beyond that, offshore drilling is expensive. They’re not going to do it until we reach around $5-6 / gallon. Even then, it acts as a stabilizer at $5-6 per gallon. Oh, and it takes time too, so yeah, 8 years from now is really going to help me at the pump.

I dont see how eliminating CAFE standards will be a boon to lower gas prices. Likely you’ll see fleet MPG go down, and theres no benefit. Consumption will go up, supply isnt going up due to the elimination of CAFE standards, so, yeah, higher prices. You included that point in a list of ways to cut gas prices, so now I just feel like this is 7 ways of pushing my own agenda, and oh yeah, look, through sordid reasoning I get to say it lowers gas prices.

Ethanol from Brazil is a good idea. Leave it to our government to get greedy with a good thing and pander to the midwest, even when they dont understand the midwest. Brilliant as usual.

China, Russia, and India can plan out 100’s of new reactors because they don’t live in a political or moral environment where thinking ahead is not only prudent, but necessary. We have an energy crisis right now, and its relatively minor, but yeah, its pretty bad. Lets not be short-sighted and follow it all up with an environmental crisis of epic proportions. I’m not saying dont build reactors. I’m saying the knee-jerk reactions don’t have a place in the political process.

I really don’t see reason to leave big oil alone. Capitalism only works in the face of an educated, involved consumership, otherwise it spins off and starts causing, well, price gouging. Theres already a body, OPEC, in place that sets the price for oil exports. You couldn’t do that in the US without being an illegal monopoly. Its time for some tough regulations. In the end, we’re using more oil than any other country in the world. We have the consumer power to force them to lower their profits, they’re not very well able to cut off exports to the US. Whats the harm in exercising it?

Marty makes some good points and some very bad points. Americans do need to makes choices about where they live and how frequently they shop. However, in the meantime most cannot hope onto a moving van and say bye bye to suburbia. If anything CAFE standards need to be higher. The technology exists but the American automakers have resisted building efficient cards. Does Chrysler even have a hybrid on the drawing board.
Oil companies should be incented to identify non-oil alternatives to petroleum. This money would come from taxing windfall profits. Speculation on oil needs to be investigated and possibly curtailed. If we treat electricity and water as utilities why not oil?
Drilling off shore should be a state’s rights issue. If a state wants to trade off exploration for tourism it should be their right. Additionally, oil spills becomes their problem as well as being held accountable for sullying the shores of a neighboring state.
Cars should be taxed on the square footage they occupy. The larger the car the more expensive it should be.
If there was a change in perspective amonst the American public it should be the realization that taking more than your share means that somewhere along the road of geopolitics the US will have to send its boys and girls to some god forsaken land to protect our addiction. Get Smart America.

Will, good point about those petroleum reserves being worth even more in the future. I doubt that we won’t need oil in 20 or even 50 years. It’s used to make so many products in the future burning it for energy might be considered insane. I don’t think your comparison between CAFE and littering laws is valid, the two seem too different. CAFE is a cop-out by the government. If the government wants to curb oil consumption it needs to tax its use. Taxing or regulating the sale of products that use oil will mainly cause people to hold on to their existing products.

It’s peak oil folks. ANWAR has a few months of consumption but won’t solve the problem. Drilling there will cause the worst kind of development in one of the last unspoiled wildernesses in the world. Furthermore, that tiny amount of oil will be worth a heck of a lot more 20 years from now when the Saudis and Russians have peaked and production is really crashing. Let’s hold on to it until we absolutely have to. Hopefully, it will be obsolete because we won’t be basing our economy on oil 20 years from now.

Finite resources cannot be the base of the economy for too long.

Nuclear power is really expensive per KwH. In fact, its more expensive than wind power. We’re running out of sources for uranium and will be out of fuel in 20 or 30 years and there is that waste problem. See Ken Deffeyes books and website (http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/) for more.

Your idea of throwing out CAFE so everyone can have choice is like saying we should not have anti-littering laws because we should let the “free market” decide whether we have litter on the highways. Then, you would use the fact that there’s lots of litter on the highways to argue that the law doesn’t work so we should just go back to the free market.

The question is how expensive would gas be and how much more inefficient would our cars be now if we had not had CAFE. The fact that it left a loophole so people would buy SUVs doesn’t mean the concept of fuel standards is bad. It just means the law was poorly written and that the congress failed to fix the law.

The entire planet must get off the petroleum “high”, as the future existence of all living things is endangered. There are nothing like very hard-hitting general crises to provoke great solutions, but nothing really important will not come without great sacrifice.
The European community is already living with twice the retail price of gasline in the USA. Yet life and R&D goes on.
Alternatives to petroleum-based energy sources exist, and must continue to be developed. The continued use of ICE motorizations is not practical, even with ethanol, and real alternative solutions are nearer than many think.
Meanwhile, use of petroleum should be limited to the absolutely imperative. A short list would include: medicine, synthetics and aircraft fuel.
Ed

The biggest way to lower gas prices in the future:

HIGHER, much Higher, gas prices NOW!

According to the nytimes editorial today:

“Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to produce energy. That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.”

lots more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

People don’t seem to realize that there is a responsibility that goes along with freedom of choice. EG: You have the right to bear arms, but you are responsible for their security and safe operation. (So you don’t pull a Dick Cheney on your best pal while out hunting.

The freedom we enjoy is an amazing privilige, and should not be seen as an all or nothing proposition.

Jim

“Get past this freedom of choice thing?”
Never.