Posted on 03/17/2004 2:08:40 PM PST by backhoe
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You'll note the first reply was a snarky crack about "panic"-- when gas was about $1.45 a gallon.
My reasoning behind the title was elementary- take the price of gas and double it.
Just to get people's attention focused on how bad it might get. I never thought I'd be a prophet.
And I can remember $0.25 a gallon gas, and Sunoco 260 for high-compression engines, like the first V-8 I ever built with 12.5:1 pistons.
Thanks for the chart showing that real gas prices are not so high. But why not have much lower gasoline prices?
I can't see why your idea couldn't be tried-- it's fairly simple business sense that if you want less of an activity, you tax & regulate it to death, and if you want more activity, you lighten up.
Where I live, we have a perfectly good power plant that sits idle most of the time- formerly a coal/oil fired installation, it was forced into converting to a "peaker plant," fueled by natural gas, in the nineties.
Ironically, when it was on the coal cycle, in the sixties, all you could see exiting the stack was heat shimmers- no smoke, it was so clean-burning.
To me, that's just a waste of an expensive plant.
Start a new thread:
Sticker Shock: $12.99 a gallon gasoline???
Two years later, time to eat your words. :)
Good God, don't even think that- it might come true!
Although, seriously, I guess it's stabilized, with maybe a little downward drift- that last link about a natural gas glut, and dropping prices in my area, may indicate that direction.
Price is a great motivator- I always ask myself that old WWII question-- "is this trip really necessary?"
the government makes more on gas taxes than the oil companies make in profits....
and the government made the same amont of money off every gallon of gas regardless of the price of crude oil...
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/1139.html
Table 1. State and Federal Gasoline Taxes Compared to Major U.S. Oil Companies Domestic Profits, 1977-2004
(figures in billions of 2004 dollars)
Total
Oil Profits $643.0
Federal Taxes $533.0
State Taxes $810.1
Total Taxes $1,343.1
Thanks for the stats- any time I hear a politician ( or media talking head ) rant about "profiteering," I know I am hearing a demagogue pandering to the ignorant masses. Unfortunately, they vote.
These two figures show former temperatures with major periods of glaciation labeled. The dashed lines are the present global average temperature of about 15° C (59° F). Thus the solid curves show small changes from this average; note that the temperature drops only about 5° C during a glaciation. This has occurred about every 100,000 years, with smaller wiggles in between. That is, there has been a 100,000 year glaciation cycle for the past million years or so, and there may be shorter cycles as well.
The most recent glaciation, 20,000 years ago, is called the Laurentide, and Earth is still recovering from it. This map from the The Illinois State Museum exhibit on ice ages shows the extent of that ice.
The most recent small drop in average temperature caused the Little Ice Age of 1500-1700 AD, which history describes. Mountain glaciers advanced in Europe and rivers like the Thames in England froze solid, which doesn't happen now.
The growth of the ice sheets began about 120,000 years ago as ice built up on the continents in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Canada and Europe. The largest extent of these ice sheets occurred 18,000 years ago. At that time the largest ice sheets were between 3.5 and 4 km thick. In North America the largest ice sheet was the Laurentide Ice Sheet centered on Hudson Bay with other sheets centered on Greenland and in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. As these ice sheets expanded they grew together, covering Baffin Bay and eventually the Great Lakes and New England. In northwestern Europe the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet began to grow and expand south to cover what is now Norway and Sweden and north to cover the exposed continental shelf. Over time the ice sheet grew to cover Finland and the United Kingdom. This ice sheet extended east to the Ural Mountains where it met the Siberian Ice Sheet. Before the last ice age ice sheets already existed on Antarctica and on Greenland.
Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective - understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly "catastrophically high." Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years. Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that's a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current 'guesstimations' of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol's irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?
EPA report concludes 'boutique' fuels not culprit in high gas prices [i.e. "Don't blame us!"]
Check NRANews.com for Cam's live reports on the conference.
Why isn't the MSM covering this? Never mind. (Check Jeff's weekly anti-gun bias check at Alphecca.)
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