In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
My suspicion is that it isn't going to be too many more years before we're back to where our great-great-grandparents were, where most people never went further than 40 miles from where they were born because it simply was too expensive or too arduously slow to travel any further.
-- Badtux the Futurist Penguin
Yes, those are real prices. No, I didn't diddle it with Photoshop.
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.
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Assuming these are prices per gallon and not liter, I don't know what you're complaining about. It's pretty cheap - gas prices here are about 130% of these, and have been for quite some time.
ReplyDeleteCall me one American who isn't complaining about the price of gas. I don't own a personal vehicle, and if need be, I can walk to the place I work (though it'll take me a while to get there). I've taken a liking to the "Ha Ha Fuck You" attitude the Culture Ghost has adopted in recent months. Driving is like gawking at the Toob these days -- it's costing people in more ways than they realize, and yet they just can't help themselves, can they? They just gotta drive, and they just gotta gawk.
ReplyDeleteFine, let 'em suffer. I can always buy a bicycle if I have to...
we are a society and economy dependent on transportation --- these gas prices will kill that -- and the friends of bush and oil companies do not care one iota.
ReplyDeletenot one bit.....
you are right -- people will not travel - but what the trouble that happens when resources that cannot be transported anymore start to bring battles -- like food
I've kept my travels as short as possible for the last ten years. And it had nothing to do with the price of gas, just my new concern about the planet.
ReplyDeleteI'm rooting for ten bucks a gallon, maybe it will bring greedy America in line.
Well, Yossi, those are not U.S. gallons, not Imperial gallons, so they're smaller than the gallons you may be familiar with. But anyhow, the deal is that while gasoline prices have been higher in some places for quite some time, that's because of road taxes. You may have been paying $5 a gallon in France ten years ago, but $4 of that was taxes to discourage people from driving. French farmers didn't pay that for fuel to operate their farm machinery. French railroads didn't pay that for fuel to operate their diesel locomotives. French shipping companies didn't pay that for fuel to operate their ships. French airlines didn't pay that for fuel to operate their aircraft.
ReplyDeleteBut U.S. road taxes on fuel are minimal -- they haven't been raised in over a decade (thus why our roads are falling apart). So what you see is what *everybody* pays -- railroads, shippers, airline companies, everybody. The repercussions are going to reverberate through the economy. There are already truckers who are walking away from their trucks because Wal-mart won't pay them enough money to cover the fuel to haul their shit to Wal-mart so they can't pay the payment on their trucks and so they walk away and let it get repo'ed by the lenders because that's all they can do. The remains of the U.S. railroad network are already overtaxed as truck traffic shifts to rail (steel-on-steel has much less friction than rubber-on-concrete and diesel-electric power plants are extremely efficient). But our rail network was built when the U.S. had 1/3rd of the population that it has now. There is no way that it can carry everything needed to sustain technological civilization without significant infrastructure investments that are not being made.
The next problem, as was pointed out by distributorcap, is going to be *food*. The migrant workers who follow the harvests from north to south over the course of the year need some way to do that. Right now they own crappy old cars that also serve as their homes in far too many cases. But if they can't get gasoline for their cars, they can't get to where they need to be to do the harvesting. Then there's the farm equipment itself, which burns fuel. And the harvest gets carried to the processing plant via, for the most part, gasoline-powered trucks -- during citrus harvesting season locally, it's pretty interesting watching these stake-side trucks hauling down the road full of lemons or oranges or whatever to the nearest processing plant or distribution center. And there's fertilizer. Fertilizer is basically a way of turning oil into food. It's going to get significantly more expensive now. And people are going to start starving all around the world.
Then there's the impending national bankruptcy of the United States, part of which is related to these fuel prices, which will render the U.S. incapable of importing oil at all. When North Korea lost access to fertilizer and fuel for their farm machinery, their food production dropped by TWO THIRDS. If U.S. food production dropped by 2/3rds, there would be widespread starvation around the world and a whole lot of hunger within the United States itself. Ironically, the people most likely to be fed are those who are most spat upon today -- the manual laborers of America, whose ranks will swell as muscle power replaces oil.
More later on the repercussions. Let's just say that the collapse of the American Empire will make the collapse of the Weimar Republic look like tapioca pudding insofar as its effect upon the world goes. Germany in 1933 did not have the ability to project forces worldwide in an attempt to seize at gunpoint resources needed to maintain its economy, and Germany in 1933 didn't have nuclear weapons. The U.S. in 2010 under President McCain will have both of those... meaning, if major U.S. cities don't end up glowing in the dark, I'm a penguin.
- Badtux the Pessimist Penguin
Badtux
ReplyDeleteThat was an excellent summary. It's only sad that we must endure this time in history.
Nice post, Badtux, and even better follow-up. I agree with, and worry a great deal about, the issues raised here. The last time I owned a car was late 80's. Now I don't even have a license. The situation we are now facing has been hurtling toward us like a major earthquake, unpredictable only in it's precise timing.
ReplyDeleteAs a point of interest, I think I recognize this station: if I'm correct, it's in Panamint Valley, the next Valley west of Death Valley. The price has gone up only (!) 20 cents since mid-March while the average price around the country has risen, what, 50-75 cents? There is no way I can describe how remote this spot is.
Yep, you nailed it on the location, it's Panamint Springs. Let's just say that the total permanent population of the Panamint Valley is probably about a dozen people, and most of them are at Panamint Springs.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Desert Penguin
"My suspicion is that it isn't going to be too many more years before we're back to where our great-great-grandparents were, where most people never went further than 40 miles from where they were born because it simply was too expensive or too arduously slow to travel any further."
ReplyDeleteActually, I am pretty much at that point now.
40 mile round trip to work, 40 mile round trip to see my 94 year old grandmother twice a monyh and that's about it, except for local driving.
That I am going to get something itty bitty and dirt to cheap to operate for.
Maybe even, (GASP), a scooter.