I just get the feeling that people aren’t going to be too pleased to learn about this:
Two oil giants, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, announced record profits yesterday totaling $17 billion in the first three months of the year. Exxon Mobil is expected to smash its own previous records for quarterly corporate profits tomorrow. Average gasoline prices, meanwhile, have surged to a new high of $3.60 per gallon.
If you thought the war in Iraq would provide us with cheap gas, you were wrong. If you thought the war in Iraq would bring record corporate profits to the oil giants, you were right.
It’s a curious thing. Put a Texas Oil Man in the Oval Office and the same stuff keeps happening. But no matter how many times we try it, land wars in Asia are always a bad idea.
What does Exxon management know that we don’t?
I hate hearing the price of oil has always “gone up” to something LESS than what I’m paying. Frustrating. I’d love to go back to $3.60.
The last time I paid $3.60 was probably about 4 months ago. I remember the gas had dropped down to $3.49 in late January for about 3 hours and I filled up immediately. Now it’s $.4.09 – $4.19. I can’t afford this.
My original reason for taking a bus to work was to reduce my carbon footprint. But increasingly, it’s becoming an economic necessity. And I wouldn’t complain, were the pain shared equally.
But while zillionaires drown their assets in oil profits, geez, the rest of us could use a break.
It gets worse. I don’t even own a car, so I am dependent on the bus to get back and forth to work. Now for some reason there is a horse’s ass out here in western Washington named Tim Eyman who has a burr up his butt about public transportation. He has in the past sponsored initiatives that aim to do things like make all car tabs in the state $30 (passed, ruled unconstitutional but the Legislature reinstated something similar) and devote all gasoline taxes in the state to road maintenance and construction, gutting public transportation (failed). I keep hoping he’ll go broke doing this stuff before he can do permanent damage to my means of getting to work; he’s had to take out a mortgage on his house to finance his latest round of signature gatherers, so maybe there’s hope.
Unfortunately there are more like him, and as a result transportation in the Puget Sound is a mess. Sooner or later, between $10 gas and 8 MPH commutes on the local freeways, people will wise up and start funding public transportation in this area like it should be. So far it ain’t happened.
What ever happened to the monorail project? The public voted for that twice. Is it moving forward at all???
In a word, dead from a combination of indecision, dithering and wastefulness on the part of the Monorail Board, which gave anti-monorail groups the opening they needed to kill the project. I can dig up the details if you’re interested.
Me, I would have liked to have seen the monorail expanded all over King County to hit places like Boeing, Microsoft, Bellevue’s downtown business district, the University and some other high-density areas as an alternative to the light rail Sound Transit has been building and promoting.
Where is Sound Transit to go? I mean, the biggest choke points are in and out of downtown Seattle – that bridge over Lake Washington – I was stuck on that little 5 minute drive for nearly an hour one pre-Christmas weekend. What a nightmare!!
I ride my bike to work on some days. I don’t know if it is my imagination or not, but it seems like there are a lot more people on bicycles than there were last year.
I hope that’s true!
I’m committed to a road trip with the family at the end of June. My mother-in-law is hosting a family reunion in southern Idaho, then we’re going to Yellowstone Park, and finally we’re going to visit my family in central Montana. My sister has cancer in her breast and lungs, so I don’t really dare not go, just in case her treatment doesn’t work out so well.
I figure this trip is going to eat my entire so-called economic stimulus payment. And I’m going to enjoy it, and I hope my wife and daughter and granddaughter enjoy it, because this may be the last long distance road trip we are ever going to be able to take.
I remember when I was a kid we used to take road trips all the time, to everywhere and nowhere, up and down the Pacific coast and to places like Montana and Yellowstone and Disneyland and the national parks of Utah. But until we can figure out how to make personal vehicles that don’t rely on petroleum or we reinstate the railroads, the days when families could do that will soon be gone.
I know that feeling. I am SO glad I took my big road trip last summer. I drove through Southern Utah and most of Colorado, then dropped down to Santa Fe and came back the southern route. I drove 8-10 hours nearly every day. It was expensive at last numbers prices, but it would have been truly prohibitive had I waited. I’m so glad I went. It’s a shame though. We live in such an amazingly beautiful country, and it pains me that many fewer Americans will see it (even as the Euro- and pound-rich Europeans will still make the trek because THEY can afford it….)
Funny thing – back in the 90’s I used to travel to Europe a few times a year and they would say the same thing about us: “Those dollar-rich Americans are buying everything up like it’s nothing, because they can afford it.”
When we were rolling in dough and gas was “cheaper” we kept saying that we’d do a road trip with the kids, but we were too busy with work. Now we’re flat broke, have a half a tank of gas, and all our bills come due on Thursday. I really wish we had taken that road trip now.
I hate to mention it, but we’re hoping to take a trip to Disneyland at the end of the year, although the idea there will be to use frequent flyer miles and companion fares to fly down rather than driving. The reasons we are doing these trips are twofold. First, as I said, the price of fuel is getting prohibitive. And second, with my wife’s arthritis and my aching back, it won’t be too long before we might not be able to do such trips at all.
So I hope you’ll be able to take that road trip one of these days, cost of gas at all, when your kids are old enough to enjoy the trip. They’ll remember it for the rest of their lives. My sisters and I were just recently talking about trips we’d taken over 40 years ago, remembering everything from sleeping in the back of the station wagon to who got carsick when. It’s amazing how such things eventually become nostalgia. 🙂
Even just five years ago none of us would have thought we’d be having discussions like this in America, the “richest country on earth.” Right?
It’s like we know we’re all going to the slaughterhouse. The next great depression is coming. No avoiding it.
I’m totally feeling you on that one.
I assume you will be renting a car for the road trip. You can get a Prius from Avis. Consider it.
Hmmmmm . . . actually I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks for the tip.
Southern Idaho, sounds like you’ll be taking 90, but I’ll be waving from northern eastside! Cascade Hwy opens tomorrow morning, freedom!
But the price of gas in the “heartland” where the country is least populated, is the most important measure of everything American!!! Don’t you know? Gee, Heartland, Heartland, Heartland! The coasts don’t matter to the national psychology at all, just the fucking corn belts.
If you voted for a Texas oilman for President, you have no bitch about high gasoline prices. If you didn’t, then, you can complain. Feel bettter now?
in 2000?
–Oh, I forgot, we actually did.
Well it was an oil president who took office, and right away we started having oil crises.
Don’t you wish we’d seated the tobacco president and ended up with a tobacco crisis instead?
Paying at the pump
The so-called Big Oil companies are no longer the powers they were 30 years ago. Today they control less than 10 percent of global crude oil production. National Oil Companies control the rest. Examples: In Russia and Saudi Arabia production is controlled by the state.
Pemex in Mexico is hobbled because the state takes most of the export revenues in the form of taxes. This has 2 negative effects for Mexico as their oil production has been declining since late 2004.
1. Pemex has too little money for the added drilling programs they need to try to boost production.
2. The federal budget of Mexico is more than 40% dependent upon oil export taxes and exports have declined 12.5%. Fortunately for Mexico the high world prices have been a boon and they have not yet decreased Mexican government revenues. But think of the impact on Mexico if, in 5 years or so, exports drop to zero.
Shell Oil is doing a better job than Exxon at being a corporate citizen of the world by admitting the production is likely to decline within the next few years and by investing in alternatives. But I have doubts about how many oil companies will survive the decline of petroleum as it is rare for a monolithic business to make a successful transition into a new, unfamiliar, field of business. A transition from being an oil & gas company to coal would be tough for some but to solar or wind or biofuels or battery technologies much, much more difficult.
Exxon is slowly liquidating their company. They have no access to new places to drill, their technical staff is aging toward retirement, their stockholders want profits per share and oil-reserves-per-share etc. so they are spending to buy back shares and decrease the shareholder base. This helps make Exxon a Good stock to be in your retirement portfolio but means Exxon won’t be of much use to resolve the energy crisis as hydrocarbon production growth rates first go flat and then decline.
Oil prices in the USA are now set in the world market as we import more than 60% of what we burn every day.
If we reach the point (maybe – WHEN we reach the point) where exporters keep their oil at home to keep their own population happy we will be hurting. Back in the Nixon/Carter years we were about 20% dependent.
Oil parallels Rice
Look at the world situation in Rice. Some crop failures and some population growth and the three largest exporters of rice have limited, taxed or even blocked exports to keep prices lower in the home country. The Philippines is now in a tough spot because they are the largest per capita importer of rice. For them it is not merely expensive they cannot buy all they need.
Saudi Arabia today has a higher per capita oil consumption than the USA. Indeed most (all?) OPEC members are selling gasoline and diesel at below-market prices. Iran is in the odd position of lacking enough refineries and is importing refined gasoline at market prices and then selling at lower prices. This situation leads to 2 bad outcomes.
a. OPEC internal consumption will continue to boom
b. Exports will decline, may even decline even though production is growing.
The USA has done little since the Carter administration to face this and today our vulnerability is much greater.
I bike as much as possible, but the cost of gas is beginning to impact my summer plans. Simply put, it is going to be impossible to get to bluegrass festivals because the cost of driving is too much.
I have to do a volunteer gig this weekend in Long Island, and I simply cannot afford to go. But I am signed up for it and we’re carpooling.
ugh.
The american public gets ripped off again, and no one does a thing.
I know what you mean. A weekly trip to the city makes me cringe at $3.61 a gallon…and I’m already planning to start using my bike for those short runs to the grocery store (3 or so miles away).
And I’m dreading what our summer trip to the outer banks is going to cost us in gas this year.
I juts called up my oil company to see if I could buy now and then pay off over the course of the year.
no such luck: If I want 500 gallons of oil, about what I use during winter, I have to pay it all up front. And ya know, I just don’t have $1600.00 lying around. I wish I shit dollar bills, but unfortunately no.
Our local propane dealer made a point of calling over to the refinery to ‘make a buy’. They sent out letters to all of us that in order to participate we needed to agree to an in-home inspection for $50 of our appliances to make sure they were operating efficiently – I needed 1 filter changed – and then they were able to lock in the price for us. We won’t have to make the buy until Sept but the price is locked in at this month’s price.
Better than a kick in the shins.