no one will ever care about that. Not even the government its got more then what 2 years worth of oil and such stored away in a warehouse for their personal use?

For a country where nobody cares about the rising price of gas, I am sure hearing lots of complaining about gas prices… :wink:

And two years of oil is absolutely nothing in the scale of things… it's not even one president's term!

Well, Metsuro, I think the government is playing games in some regards with the current fuel price situation, but otherwise most of us are pretty concerned about fuel efficiency and public transportation along with the rising price of gasoline, but David's also going a little extreme himself trying to imply that none of us Americans have cared about these things before and still wouldn't if it weren't currently hurting our pockets. These things have been a concern for decades, at least to those of us who lived through the seventies, David…

I'll second most of what Conner said. Those of us who, even if we may have been young kids at the time, still remember the odd & even and gas lines down the street for miles know all too well that Americans in general *DO* care. It's only that the media is interested in it now that it's receiving so much attention lately. Not at all unrelated to the fact that we're in an election mode :)

The big disagreement I have with Conner's assertion that the government is playing games with the pricing is that our government has no control over that. It's all entirely in the hands of OPEC and the greedy oil speculators. Hrm… so… ok, maybe they have some control if they'd start arresting the bastards for trying to ruin the economy or something. But still. It's not like evil old Bush can sit there and just declare one day that he wants gas at $4.50/gal and there's nothing anyone can do. The whole thing is incredibly complex, but in the end is definitely being manipulated.

Conner, I did not say that nobody has ever cared about these issues ever before… I said that people are all of a sudden starting to care now after it being a non-issue previously. If you have to go all the way back to the seventies to the worst oil crisis in history to show that Americans care, I think that sort of proves my point that in general it wasn't a huge concern in the US recently. US gas prices went down dramatically after that crisis blew over, but stayed high in Europe (and this shaped mentalities greatly in both areas). The reasons for this are varied and indeed complex as Samson says, but the government most certainly plays a massive role in the whole affair via taxes and subsidies. I agree that the recent rise in price is not the government's fault, however, it is somewhat naive to think that the government plays no role whatsoever in gas pricing in general.

Incidentally, gas prices have been rising since 2003; that the current situation coincides with an American election is just that, coincidental. If you actually look at a price curve, we are in a period of rapid increase. It's kind of silly to say that people only care now because the media does – and I thought that people have always cared, hmm? – because it is a simple fact that prices have more than doubled since 2003. A 100% increase in just 5 years is pretty shocking and a cause for concern.

It's also oh-so-interesting to see how the automobile industry is responding to this (and proof that mentalities are changing). If people had always been as concerned as they are now, we would have seen hybrids much earlier (the technology has been around for a long time). Companies would have been marketing cars as fuel efficient for much longer, as well. So basically, the fact of the matter is that fuel efficiency is becoming more and more important in the eyes of the consumer in general. It suffices to observe the fact that people are talking about it a lot now, but not five years ago. That is pretty much the definition of something being a current issue. :wink:

I don't see it as such a complex issue, its a simple issue of supply and demand and that the resource is finite. You have a situation where billions of Chinese and Indians now wish to drive cars over other more traditional forms of transports in those societies. Oil is finite, there is only so much of it in the ground and at some point it is going to run out. The amount that is there is pure speculation and many of the reserve figures have not been updated since the 80's.

One area that the government does have control over in the petrol cycle is efficiency. After the 70's governments legislated to improve the efficiency of cars, through the 80's vast improvements were made, thought he 90s and 00's apathy set in due to very cheep oil. The gains that were made were withered away in ever larger SUV's and sports performance cars. Europe and even somewhat here in Australia many have not really felt the hikes in petrol because we mostly drive small 4 cylinder vehicles, and in Europe many of those are diesel and not petrol.

Government needs to get tough again and bring in some real industry reform, give car makers real standards to work towards and give consumers a reason and incentive to buy smaller cars that are suited to life in cities. Altho my own government has been slack for the last 15 years, one thing they have now started to do is replace the government fleet with Toyota hybrids. These will not be the Prius, but will be based on the Camrey and through various deals built in an Australian plant. One spin off from this is that the Government replaces its vehicles every 18 months, which will put a lot of cheep hybrids into the market over the next few years, this will help improve the technology and to also make it mainstream.

David, I'm still inclined to think Conner is right and that the people have cared all along but the media didn't give a crap until just recently. Once they started making a big flap about it ( not conicidentally btw ) before the 2004 election, everyone started to pay more attention. The media has kept harping on it, using the issue as a political weapon like they always do. That was of course before OPEC jumped on it and decided they may as well push things along themselves and now the whole thing has spiraled out of control.

I suspect at this point that even if the government wanted to step in to bring prices down, they'd fail, and then what? The only other options left after failing at price controls are diplomatic pressure, which those countries will just ignore, or war, which the Democrats would go ape shit over.

The consumer has no power to bring down prices when the price is being manipulated by a cartel. The only thing they can do is respond by buying ever more efficient vehicles. In that regard, hybrids are not the answer to our problems. Hydrogen cars are. The sooner we realize this the better off we'll be. With a hydrogen based transportation system we need only look to our own seashore for all the water we'd ever need to split into fuel. Play it right and maybe you could even piggyback using the leftovers as drinking water since you'd have to desalinate the water anyway.

Lower demand and lower consumption will bring down prices as companies then have to compete and entice consumers to use their products, currently there is not enough supply and excess demand on a product that will run out or become nonviable in mine or my kids lifetimes.



Hybrids are a technology thats available now that can deliver proven savings in fuel without costing anything more than a conventional vehicle. Couple this current technology with off the grid recharging and you can further extend the benefits to the consumer and to CO2 emissions. Hydrogen is not really a solution for small passenger vehicles, it does not compress well enough per unit of energy to make it viable this way. For things like buses it will work well because of all the extra space that can be used to store the hydrogen. It is also not cost effective. To derive hydrogen from water the energy input is greater than what you get out and unless your sitting on vast deposits of renewable energy it will never happen. Iceland has all its city buses running on hydrogen and many in the world are looking closely to see how they get on with it. Iceland, tho has vast hydrothermal and hydro energy that is cheep and clean to use to produce the hydrogen. Iceland also has legislated to convert all transport over to hydrogen as the technology becomes available.

This is topic that comes close to my own studies, being that I'm majoring in ecology and the environment and is something i could write reams about, but i wont bore you will all of it, but will leave it with a prediction by the CSIRO (Australia's premier science organization akin to NASA), which has released a study that predicts the price of petrol in 10 years time will be in the vicinity of $8 per litre, $32 a US gallon. I have not read the whole report so i cannot say how the study was undertaken, but once classes start up again in 2 weeks it will be one that I try and get my hands on, I just hope one of my freinds doing PHD's can get access to it.

Perhaps you're not quite understanding. There is no competition in oil. It's run by a cartel. A small group of powerful and wealthy people who have complete control over the pricing. They don't respond in a traditional supply and demand way to how much or how little consumers are using. In fact, given who the members of this cartel are, they're far more likely to use their power as a weapon. It's been done once before in my lifetime and our country paid dearly for it.

There's oodles of oil waiting to be drilled up. The vast majority of the newer discoveries are outside the territories the cartel members live in. Many of those new discoveries are within our own borders. All we need to do is go get it. That is of course assuming you can convince Congress to allow it instead of spending their time worrying about field rats that might get displaced by new oil wells.



I see you haven't looked into the dark side of hybrids. Mainly into what do you do about the batteries when it comes time to maintenance them. And they will need it. The last time I read up on it, the hidden costs of dealing with hybrids was far greater than the known costs involved in maintaining gas powered cars. And the hybrids still require gasoline. You aren't eliminating much of anything in the long run. Only delaying the inevitable.



Try telling that to the Honda engineers that have not only produced prototypes of hydrogen powered passenger cars, but are set to begin full scale production on a consumer line of then in the next year or two. Also, there have been several articles and documentaries produced detailing how you'd either get the hydrogen from splitting sea water or build the generation plant right there at the station itself. Self generating it would eliminate any need for a large transportation system to move it around. All of this has been well documented and proven to be cost effective once the initial infrastructure investment was made. If you're basing the claim that it isn't cost effective on having to build the infrastructure first, then gas powered cars weren't cost effective either. Yet here we are.



I think perhaps the backstory writers of the Fallout 2 game were probably much closer to the mark. In the intro to that game, they described in detail a scenario where gas costs began rising out of control and once we passed the $5-$7/gal mark wars broke out and eventually led to nuclear holocaust. We're never going to see it get to $32/gal without someone being bombed back to the stone age. In 10 years time if I end up being wrong and we're all still here, you be sure and track me down to say you told me so :)

I think you believe to much of the hyperbole that the US government spins, there is no conspiracy here, just plain old supply and demand, currently there is not enough oil to supply all of those who want it, which leads to panic buying by economies that are built around oil. Add on the recent demands of China and India, growing economies who now have a huge thirst for oil and do not produce any or much of their own and you have a rapid inflation of cost as people are willing to pay anything to have their fix.

Opec does not set the price, the market does and for the most part, the things that have really hit production are the US invasion of Iraq, and fear over the US invading Iran as well. Iraq took huge amount of oil out of supply and if Iran is invaded as well, it will shut down production from that country which will lead to even higher prices. Iraq has announced that it wants to double production within 2 years i think the time was. Thats hardly the action of someone trying to fix the price.



Really, the funny thing is, the science does not support the claim. The US has just announced that it wants companies to step up drilling activities in a number of areas to increase production including Alaska to try and reduce your dependency on foreign oil. These are not new fields, they are old known reserves, some of which have not been used yet because of the impact on the environment. New discoveries has not kept up with demand for over well over 10 years. There is only one way forward from here and thats higher and higher prices for oil.



Oh i have, the focus of the discussion so far was on cost of oil, not the environmental impacts caused by differing technologies so those factors were not considered as part of what i was presenting.



The Honda Clarity is a hydrogen fuel cell car with a range of 280 miles. And while they have put it into production it will not get very far, not because of infrastructure, but because of its range. All hydrogen powered cars suffer the same problem, you just cannot compress enough hydrogen into a small enough space safely at ambient temperatures and still have room for luggage in the boot. The buses in Iceland use the same technology, the full length of the roof is devoted to hydrogen storage to give the bus a range of a full days driving, but it takes 5 to 10 minutes to refuel one, this is just not a very practice solution to consumers who are used to refueling in 2 mins.

Hydrogen is not cheep because you have to input something in the order of 3 times the energy you receive back from it, this works in Iceland because they use hydrothermal energy to make the hydrogen, its cheep, clean and green, the CO2 footprint is minimal. Hydrogen will only work if we have cheep renewable energy sources to produce it and even then, if we have cheep renewable, there is not much need for hydrogen, we can just move straight to full electric.

For countries like ours, it would be cheaper and less polluting to directly recharge from the grid, even if that energy has been derived from coal. There is a company in the US i forget the name who make a 2 seat electric sports car that is recharged from the grid, its way expensive and has a range the same or greater than that of the Clarity. They have used off the shelf parts to make the car, using Li-on batteries, Gm have also developed a multi approach prototype that uses hydrogen cell, off the grid battery recharging and a small ethanol powered engine i think for recharging, they cite battery technology as the only thing stopping them putting it into production.



I agree that we wont see petrol at that price, but not for the same reasons. Over the next 10 years we will see real advances in technology that will remove our reliance on oil, things like using bacteria to break down cellulose directly into ethanol are about 4 to 5 years away. Hybrids that have off the grid recharging and cheep ethanol will tide over our liquid fuel internal combustion engine obsession until we can develop better battery technology and for solar to become mainstream. In 10 years time the only certainty is that we will be both wrong, as with all predictions in matters like this, no one really knows.

Mudbytes….


A place where you can go from one subject to a completely different subject that people just argue. Not saying that there was any arguing here but in other threads. It did get way off topic though.

Anyways, I'm glad you made it to NYC David. Can't wait to see what you bring back to the smaug/mud community.

Thanks, tphegley. :smile:

Giggle, i know we are a funny lot at times.

David, I never said that we had to go back to the seventies to see it, but that those of us who lived through the seventies can certainly vouch that we'd cared all along and ever since. In any event, I'm again reminded here why I try to avoid posting to forums anymore.. Sorry if I helped derail your thread, David, as tphegley said, gratz on completing the move and good luck with whatever the future may bring.

There ya go givin away your age again ;)

I think it's a wee bit dangerous to make a statement about every single person who lived through the seventies. :wink: But don't worry about "derailing" "my" thread; it was neither 'my' thread nor derailed more than any other thread here. :wink:

Equally dangerous to assume that Americans are only now caring about fuel efficiency. As Conner said, many of us have cared all along and have never been impressed with "good gas mileage" meaning 18 mpg.

Dontcha think that the US cars would have had mileage like the EU cars by now, hmm, if the US had truly cared after the 1978 crisis blew over? It's not as if EU engineers are more competent than American engineers so it is not a technical issue. And why is it that oh-so all of a sudden car ads are focusing much more on mileage than even just 5 years ago? Just because some have cared in the past does not make it a serious national issue like it has become now – and unlike past electoral seasons, disproving the theory that it is purely a temporary electoral thing. (The prices are extremely and unusually high, after all…) If the US as an entire nation, as opposed to even a large number of people, had always cared about the issue, we would not be seeing what we're seeing today – that is a simple fact. The media reflects what the people want, after all… you have said so yourself when saying that they go after ratings more than content.

Ah well. The point is moot – the prices will rise, and eventually enough people will wake up to demand alternative or improved technology. We've seen the beginning already, with the dramatic decline in new SUV sales – yet another undeniable data point that things are changing in this country.

Undoubtedly. *sigh* :redface:


While I'm sure that's perfectly true, it surely can be no less dangerous to assume that everyone one encounters in life can only speak (type?) in literal terms, wouldn't you say so? :rolleyes:


Don't you think that if those of us who have cared had the ability to dictate effectively to vehicle manufacturers about it that these changes would've come about much sooner? Wasn't it you, in point of fact, who was generalizing by saying that Americans didn't care rather than any of us who were simply arguing that clearly that can't be the case because there are numbers (large/small or otherwise) of Americans who have cared significantly? hanging the scope of your argument as a rebuttal seems a poor tactic for someone who thrives so on debate…


An "undeniable data point" eh? I deny it, the last vehicle I bought was a SUV, in fact, so was the last car that my sister bought and her best friend too.. in fact, but we bought them for varying reasons. Myself because I can't fit my whole family in anything smaller than a SUV or Mini-van and I've owned more mini-vans than I can to consider in the past and decided to go with something different this time, but I also wanted a vehicle that was more fuel efficient than my other available alternatives which included full vans and school buses. :sad: From the data I've seen, it seems that family sizes are on the rise in this nation despite the fact that car sizes are on the decline. But you go on believing the media, I'm sure they'll never lie to you…

Consumers have the most powerful ability to dictate of them all: purchasing power. As long as Americans continued to buy low-mileage cars, why should producers care about improving mileage? It's absolutely simple and basic economics. It's why European cars have better mileage: people would not think of buying a car with less than 20mpg unless they really had to for some unusual reason. But now that things are changing in the consumer's mind, we are seeing shifts in not only how cars are marketed, but also in the kinds of cars being built. The issue is incredibly complicated in some ways, but in others absolutely simple: consumers have all the power in the world in a truly free market.

Surely you do not think that you and your immediate entourage are the sole indicators of the entire SUV purchase market…? Go read the WSJ (at least there is no potentially 'evil liberal bias' there) if you don't believe me about the SUV sales drop. And if you won't read or believe any thing other than what you've seen with your own eyes, well, there's not much point in continuing this conversation. :wink: