Well, it finally happened . . . .

cars · Post by **cars** » Thu May 15, 2008 12:50 pm

Gas at the pump today hit $4.09/9-gal reg!!!!! :-5

Filling up the tank cost $ 60.00!!!!! (And it's very likely to go way higher)

(The only saving grace, if there is one, is that my "Blue Cash credit card" gives me 5% back on my gas purchases! So I get back $3.00)

SO HAS THE OUTRAGEOUS PRICE OF GAS MADE YOU PLAN YOUR TRIPS TO DO MULTI-TASKING ALONG THE WAY IN THE SAME TRIP?

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:03 pm

Ours is $1.50 a litre:(

cars · Post by **cars** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:16 pm

kayleneaussie;866669 wrote: Ours is $1.50 a litre:(
If I did it right, that's about $5.68 a gal. But I'll bet you cars get better then the avg US 22mpg cars get! :wah:

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:21 pm

As to your first question...yes I multi task now and somtimes walk instead of driving. I have a daughter in another state I want to visit and normally I drive there but am thinking of going by train as its heaps cheaper.

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:40 pm

Ours is over £5 a gallon and my work car does about 18miles to the gallon:-5Its working out at about £1.11 a LITRE and 67p of that is tax......one of the highest I believe.Im thinking about moving to the USA lol;)

Mustang · Post by **Mustang** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:07 pm

Try filling up a 32 gal. tank cost me around $ 100.00 And that was at 3.80 a

gal. I feel sorry for the truckers out on the road. :driving:

chonsigirl · Post by **chonsigirl** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:07 pm

I always run errands at the same time, usually only once or twice a week.

Post by **spot** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:15 pm

What does a horse and saddle cost these days?

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:34 pm

...and a six gun!

And the kinky boots! (YOU know: cuban heels so the only way to avoid mincing in them is to walk like you've wet yourself:wah:)

Chezzie · Post by **Chezzie** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:49 pm

£20 pounds (38.61200 U.S. dollars) fills up a quarter of my tank with unleaded. Its over £80 to fill my tank, havent done that for a while

:driving:

Chezzie · Post by **Chezzie** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:49 pm

heh heh by the way, I dont drive a tank:sneaky:

along-for-the-ride · Post by **along-for-the-ride** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:59 pm

Ours is creeping up to $4.00/gallon...........it's $3.79 right now.

The worst part is feeling so helpless about it......I mean us against the oil companies. I know, we can carpool, ride bikes, and walk, purchase Hybrid cars............but eventually in our lives we need gasoline........so we've got to pay for it. The Oil executives went in front of Congress to justify their "record profits" and nothing was resolved.

And the gas stations can change the price anytime...in the moring it costs one thing.........by evening it costs another thing......usually higher.

Besides the above mentioned suggestions......what else can we do?

BarEdul · Post by **BarEdul** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:13 pm

Okay folks I have lost my mind... I am going on a Long trip to see my family it is about 250 miles round trip. All in all the cost wont be that bad but by the time I go I bet the price will be up to $4.20 a gallon.. OUCH!!!:-5:driving:

pinkchick · Post by **pinkchick** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:22 pm

Chezzie;866733 wrote: £20 pounds (38.61200 U.S. dollars) fills up a quarter of my tank with unleaded. Its over £80 to fill my tank, havent done that for a while

:driving:

Jeez Chezzie! I thought I was bad....to fill my car costs £62....and that only lasts a maximum of 9 days :-5:-5

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:28 pm

pinkchick;866761 wrote: Jeez Chezzie! I thought I was bad....to fill my car costs £62....and that only lasts a maximum of 9 days :-5:-5Rosie between my work car and my other one I am putting approx upto £120 a week in petrol money and thats alot of dollars and the thing is my earnings have got less due to increases in China and the fact that I am paying so much more for goods and yet I cant charge any more due to the way the market is at the moment.

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:40 pm

Is this the answer................Oh if only it could be for me

Galbally · Post by **Galbally** » Thu May 15, 2008 4:32 pm

Its like this, the age of cheap energy is nearly over, this is the fundamental truth behind what is happening. One of the main reasons that oil is going so high (outside of the low dollar) is because we are getting to a point in the immutable laws of supply and demand known as peak oil, which means that past that "peak" point, the world's ability to supply relatively cheap oil will no longer be adequate to meet the growing demand for oil both for transport and industry, fertilizers etc. We are getting to the point now where China and India's breakneck rise in total consumption is starting to seriously impact commodity prices, and causing price inflation in things like oil, gas, metals, industrial feed-stocks and now basic foodstuffs. The booming human population is also one of the major problems, because they all have to be fed, and that takes resources, at this rate we are going to end up living in a planet where every single resource we have will be used up to feed the population living in a radidly destabilizing eco-system, its quite a frightening picture really.

These commodities that are all inflating rapidly are essentially all the essentials for the energy-hungry throwaway, convinient modern lifestyle, which can only be sustained when you have massive supllies of cheap energy to justify such wasteful systems of consumption. This new inflationary situation is now the status quo; however, and its not going to change back to the way it was in the old days when Europe, Japan and the US were the only really large scale consumers for a lot of these commodities outside of basic food.

We are not quite at that point of peak oil just yet, and there are other factors at work here of course, but we are getting near, and when that point is past, the whole economics of oil and energy is going to change abruptly and forever. My best advice is get ready for significant changes because they are coming one way or the other no matter what way your politicians may attempt to glad handle the situation. Therefore, setting up your home-heating, transport, and general energy usage to be as efficient as possible would be very wise now as prices will continue to increase now. The main lesson is we all collectively have to relearn how to live in some sustainable manner as the available resources will simply not be adequate to meet all demands.

Post by **spot** » Thu May 15, 2008 11:16 pm

And not a day too soon either. The utter waste this generation's responsible for will be regarded as insane eventually. Nobody at all should be destroying oil by burning it, it's a unique manufacturing raw material and we've such short-term vision that we just use it to pollute the ecosystem instead. All because we feel justified to leave subsequent generations to cope with the mess we're making. If OPEC halves production tomorrow and doubles the price overnight I'll cheer.

cars · Post by **cars** » Fri May 16, 2008 10:34 am

spot;866892 wrote: And not a day too soon either. The utter waste this generation's responsible for will be regarded as insane eventually. Nobody at all should be destroying oil by burning it, it's a unique manufacturing raw material and we've such short-term vision that we just use it to pollute the ecosystem instead. All because we feel justified to leave subsequent generations to cope with the mess we're making. If OPEC halves production tomorrow and doubles the price overnight I'll cheer.
You most likely will be the only one! :wah: (Along with the Oil Barons)

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Fri May 16, 2008 10:42 am

cars;867471 wrote: You most likely will be the only one! :wah: (Along with the Oil Barons)

Well, I'm no oil baron, but I'm with spot on this - though it's easy for me since I've made a decision not to run a car.

Trunk Monkey · Post by **Trunk Monkey** » Fri May 16, 2008 12:33 pm

Maybe we should all use natural gas?

cars · Post by **cars** » Fri May 16, 2008 1:55 pm

Clodhopper;867495 wrote: Well, I'm no oil baron, but I'm with spot on this - though it's easy for me since I've made a decision not to run a car.
So you don't run a car, but it doesn't stop there. Are you're saying you use no "oil" products at all? How do you heat your home, using only wood, & or never run a lawnmower, & or even getting down to using electricity to run A/C, or TV, toaster, or even your PC!?

Galbally · Post by **Galbally** » Fri May 16, 2008 4:54 pm

I think its important to realize that whether you run a car or not, thats fairly irrelevant. Industrial society is almost entirely run on oil, gas and coal. Every product is made using energy of one kind or another mostly acquired from burning fossil fuels, (though some countries have nuclear power, and renewable sources, but these only represent a fraction of what is required) each one is transported, these are direct input costs. Your house, your workplace (be it factory office), your favorite pub, nightclub, restaurant, lesiure centre, bowling alley has to be heated, air-conditioned, (or both) and also supplied with electricity for the computers, machines, coffee makers, showers, TVs fax machines, photocopiers, routers, servers, steel mills, sewing machines etc etc. Then you have to get to work, and usually that means a car that burns oil, your children will probably be driven to school in that car, or your spouses car, so thats a couple of hundred kilowatts just to move around.

Everything made in Beijing and sold in Forth Worth Texas, or Seville in Spain, or Ottawa, or Melbourne has to be transported half-way across the world on a boat, or even on a plane, the plant in China will use electricity generated by Chinese coal or imported middle-east oil. The shopping mall that the product is sold in will probably use several hundred kilowatts of power every hour just to light up the shops, never mind heat them, or even worse air condition them, that energy has to come from somewhere, usually an oil or gas fired electricity plant. Every car that drives people (usually one person) from their suburban homes many miles away to get to the shopping mall represents about 100-200 kilowatts of power that also has to be found from somewhere.

At the moment that power comes from burning petroleum from the ground in the engine, and the average shopping mall would service tens of thousands of people over the course of a week, that's a lot of energy, just to get your energy-intensive products from the big energy-hungry shopping mall, to the air-conditioned, oil-heated, house.

All plastics are made from crude oil feed-stocks (well almost all), almost all chemicals come from crude oil feed-stocks, almost all fertilizers (essential for high yield industrial farming and cheap food) come from crude oil feed-stocks. Natural gas accounts for a huge amount of the electricity and heat generation in the US, Europe, and SE Asia, and at present we have few alternatives readily available that can produce anything like enough electricity at the growing demand or enough of all of the other things we now take for granted. Of course we have large coal reserves, but coal is a far more polluting fuel source that gas or oil, and carbon sequestration is still decades away.

These are really serious problems, and all of these things mean that increases in fossil fuel prices directly impact and impoverish everyone, which is why we have to somehow break our now almost pathological dependency on them or suffer the economic, and environmental consequences.

Dweedle Dee · Post by **Dweedle Dee** » Fri May 16, 2008 5:12 pm

Trunk Monkey;867626 wrote: Maybe we should all use natural gas?

No one's going to shove a traffic cone up MY butt! :yh_silent

qsducks · Post by **qsducks** » Fri May 16, 2008 6:30 pm

Chezzie;866733 wrote: £20 pounds (38.61200 U.S. dollars) fills up a quarter of my tank with unleaded. Its over £80 to fill my tank, havent done that for a while

:driving:

$3.71 per gallon today. $75.00 to fill up. :-5:-5

cars · Post by **cars** » Fri May 16, 2008 6:57 pm

Something like this is starting to look better each skyrocketing gas price hike!

All electric, NO GAS!!!!

qsducks · Post by **qsducks** » Fri May 16, 2008 7:06 pm

cars;867913 wrote:

Something like this is starting to look better each skyrocketing gas price hike!

All electric, NO GAS!!!!

I saw today on the news that the mayor of Philadelphia, PA rode his bike to work today in the rain. Good for him.

Post by **spot** » Sat May 17, 2008 12:40 pm

Galbally;867865 wrote: These are really serious problems, and all of these things mean that increases in fossil fuel prices directly impact and impoverish everyone, which is why we have to somehow break our now almost pathological dependency on them or suffer the economic, and environmental consequences.

You say "suffer", Galbally. I'd substitute "enjoy". Downsizing is a good response. Profligate consumption has sickened Western society's soul.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Sat May 17, 2008 1:04 pm

cars: Fair point. But since I'm not paying car insurance, fuel repairs or for a car itself, the costs you refer to don't hit me as hard. I'm just waiting for good solar panels I can afford. At the moment they are expensive and the market is full of dodgy products - I was told that it's like double-glazing in the 1970, which was notorious for poor quality.

cars · Post by **cars** » Sat May 17, 2008 4:01 pm

Clodhopper;868480 wrote: cars: Fair point. But since I'm not paying car insurance, fuel repairs or for a car itself, the costs you refer to don't hit me as hard. I'm just waiting for good solar panels I can afford. At the moment they are expensive and the market is full of dodgy products - I was told that it's like double-glazing in the 1970, which was notorious for poor quality.
Actually, aside from the car itself CH, my point was that you said you agreed with the statement that was made where the Oil barons should cut the production of Oil in half, & then "doubling" the price of Oil! That surely would adversely affect all!!! Everybody has & or uses something intially involved with Oil & or it's by products!