gas prices,Follow

why?

because they can. its a private for profit company. suck it up you pro capitolaist loving people. it is what capitolism is all about.

meanwhile, ....

japan is on its second year of testing public leasing of a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle that usses ZERO gasoline. this little puppy is on the road right now, but due to some regelatory concerns, the technology is not available for sale or lease in the U.S.

it is not the presidents job to solve our fuel problems, clearly both parties have demonstraited their inability or unwillingness to do so. it is ours.

buy the friggin hybrids untill an all electric or hydrogen / electric vehicle becomes available, then buy it. its all we can do besides downsizing our ford 350 duelie to a honda civic.

market demand will eventually take care of spiraling fuel costs. eventually. in the short term, show american car comapnies what we want, buy japaneese. the average millage of american cars is around 20 mpg. the average millage of a japanesse car is around 35 mpg.

for instance, i just traded in my chevy avalanche, advertised as 16 mpg in teh city, but in reality, averaged 14 on teh highway and 11 in the city, for a chevy HHR, advertised at 30 mpg highway but in reality gets about 25 on teh highway and around 20 in the city.

**** poor performance, gona buy japansses when i trade it in. still a savings of over 50 percent on my monthly gas bill, but not where it should be.

think about this. between me and my wife, together we drive less than 3 hours a day between my work and her job ans running around for hte kids.

at 3 hours a day of driving, my monthly gas bill was just over 400 dollars a month.

it costs more to drive my car for 3 hours a day, than to power my home 24/7 by a good 25 percent. my gas bill is a third car payment. it is almost double my insurance bill.

it cost more to fuel my vehicle, than it does to insure it, or power my home. and if i had bought a used vehicle, it would cost more to fuel it than buy it.

time for a change. bring on the electric. ***** hybrids or alternative fuel mixes, gimme something that doesnt use gas at all.

spoken like an oil company emploee.

The new Toyota and Honda hybrids are looking good.

The Prius was/is glitchy and ugly.

Hybrids increase fuel economy by a large degree. Thus decreasing demand. If demand sinks so do prices usually.

How doesnt that not help?


Or do you just have a hard on for a foot driven car like off the flintstones.

I was speaking more towards the electric cars. Thats why after I said "This will not help" I then said why Hybrid cars help. I quoted too much of shadow's sentance, there have been worse offenses.


Honda Civic - 30/40
Honda Civic Hybrid - 49/51 (163%/128%)

Toyota Highlander - 22/27
Toyota Highlander Hybrid - 33/28 (150%/103%)

In the case of the Honda Civic Hybrid the savings are outstanding. And the city milage on the Highlander Hybrid is pretty freaking amazing too. I think if a significant percentage bought hybrid cars it would help a good bit to control prices or at least reduce your own personal demand. But hybrids are more expensive and less popular. The Honda Civic is a great alternative. In short bodhi, you are right, and I should have left hybrids out of that sentance. I meant to point out that hybrids don't use energy from fossil sources, rather store and use the excess that the car generates through various methods, like regenerative breaking and what not.

You whining yanquis are still paying half the price we're paying for gas over here, but you whine and whine and whine.

Suck it up, sad-asses.

Drive and pay or don't drive.

Meanwhile I'll carry on with my secret plans to develop a new engine that runs on dolphin-****.

Economy + environmental safety + dolphins + ******* = guaranteed success.

Bah!
That will all help, but we also need to rethink our standards on city layout. I dont meanredesign existing cities, I mean making newly built additions and suburbs better. How? Do it like europe, where the market, the homes, and the offices are all fairly well mixed together. Who needs a car when the store is down the street, and your job is 4 blocks over?

Also, we need public transportation to improve for many places. (ex: Boise ID, my capital) If we encourage public transportation, there will be less private.

My next car will be a Toyota Highlander.

Thanks. It wouldn't, of course, eliminate our use of oil since we use it in manufacturing plastics, diesel (though fuel cells or alt. fuels could help reduce that burden), propane/butane production, etc but it would go a nice ways towards it. Engine fuel is the largest area of fuel consuption and we go out of our way to recombine those parts of petroleum that don't make gasoline the easy way to force it out of them regardless. Per Wiki:

Since the lighter liquid elements are in great demand for use in internal combustion engines, a modern refinery will convert heavy liquid and lighter gaseous elements into these higher value products using complex and energy intensive processes.

So, at worst, by reducing the use of gasoline, you'll produce a glut of heavier and lighter fuel types that would have otherwise been recombined or had the hydrocarbon chains cracked into currently profitable gasoline and diesel. Which will lower the production costs of plastics, heating oil, propane, asphalt, etc.

Edited, Fri Apr 28 17:01:24 2006 by Jophiel

Unless you get hydroelectric power, nuclear power, or other natural power then you're getting the power from your cars through fossil fuels and there is no way around that.
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so not true.

currently, with todays technology, an all electric vehical, yes there are some, will run about 2 hours at highway speeds then take 8 hours to charge.

the charger usses about as much electricity as a typical home computer. more than a tv, but less than a dryer. even if using a charger 8 hours a day increased your electric bill by a whopping 100 dollars a month, it would still be a savings of over 300 dollars a month on total cost.

the hydrogen fuel cell technology japan is using usses a hydrogen fuel cell to extend the range of a fully electric vehical. almost doubling it in some casses. it still has to be recharged eveyr day however. the fuel cell just gives the bateries a tricke charge while it is operating. and with the advances in converting kenetic energy and friction back into battery power, as in the current hybrids, japan is getting around a 200 mile range with their little fuel cell / electric lease car.

the electricity you get at your home is significantly cheaper than gasoline to power a combustion engine. even if you use fuel to run it, the total effeciancy of the power you use for transportation WILL increase substantialy. it would be no more than adding another personel computer for every car you own.

there are companies that are converting hybrid vehicals with more batteries to run less on the gas powered engine and have to be charged every day. they are getting 80 to 100 MPG by just adding a bank of batteries that have to be recharged.

why not go a step further and get rid of the gas engine? people ARE doing it right now....just not here. japan buys all their oil from US. every drop of oil from alaska is shipped to japan, not America. why? because they pay more for it. japan is paying 6 to 7 dollars a gallon, that is why their cars get better gas millage. that is why they are developing vehicals that DONT USE GAS at all, vs our "keep the oil flowing" policy of making hybrid vehicals and alternative fuels that STILL USE GAS in some form or mixture.

like i said origonally. our government does not have the ability, or the will to get this country off oil. and untill lobbiest rules change, or the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground, dont expect that to change from ANY addministraition. oil is a for profit private industry. they gave out the cheap drugs to get every one addicted, now they are reaping their rewards for their long term investments....like ANY for profit company would do.

gasoline will have to keep climbing untill it starts becomming totaly unaffordable by the masses, then market demands will solve the problem. all we can do as individuals is find a formula that works for us, weather it is hybrids, desiel, or totaly electric which is the way it will eventually lead in time.

the boating industry will hurt first, then the ineffecient american car industry. big oil will hurt last. polticans will continue to pocket oil lobbiest dollars and dance and scream like a trained monkey about helping YOU, but do little to nothing in reality.

for instance, Bush talking about lifting restrictions on refinning gas to help YOU. I.E. REDUCE the cost of oil companies EVEN MORE, increasing their profits EVEN MORE, so as not to reduce their record setting obscene profits by dropping the price of gas a coupe cents a gallon.

lobbiest dollars at work.

Or build the biggest fu[black][/black]cking hydroelectric dam the world's ever seen!




I just saw that Science Channel Megastructures episode again, for like the eleventy-billionth time

That electricity you are using to charge your car comes from burning fossil fuels.
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not every where. in south florida, we have a nuclear power plant.

and yes, while most power plants are run on oil products, it is far far cheaper to use electricity from a powerplant to charge your car on an existing distribution system than to subsidize the transportation costs, advertising, and over head of a thousand seperate gas stations.

not to mention, the total amount of oil product used will decrease with one power plant supplying power for vehicals, than one power plant using what it usses ANYWAY in ADDITION to cars burning oil products.

electric is the way to go. the distribution system is already there nation wide. no transportation costs, no advertising costs, no overhead cost. and i dont see how people will put up a fuss about plugging in their car when they get home if the NEVER have to spend time at a gas station ever again.
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I also think they charge that much because the demand is also lower in Japan. A lot of people dont even own cars and bike/walk where they need to go.
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japan is like most of europe. constant grid lock. too many cars for too few streets. they use bicycles because spending 10 bucks in gas to go to work every day to earn mabe 50 bucks just doesnt cut it. the same with europe. constant grid lock. bicycles and mopeds are more economical for the masses, tey justr simply cannot afford to drive.

the mini cooper? ROFL, in europe, it is a tiny little 3 cylinder tinker toy that gets about 60 mpg and might hold 2 skinny americans or one average american. the over powered little race car they sell here is NOTHING like the origonal. it is an americanized status symbol.

it is our attitudes toward transportation. as americans, we dont look at it from a practle since. IE, how do i spent the least amount of my resources to get to my job so i can maximize my personel income. transportation is an expence in europe, not a fassion statement like it is here. they consider cars like we consider paper towels, which one is the cheapest to buy that will do the job?.

with gas prices exploding in the last 3 years, it is our attitudes towards transportation that WILL have to change.

consider this, my monthly gas bill is higher than the cost of my insurance. my monthly gas bill is about HALF of the loan on the car itself. between my gas bill, my car insurance, and the loan for my car, i am spending about 250 dollars a week.....to drive THREE hours a day. i could almost get a taxie for that much.

that works out to around 11 dollars an hour to drive my car. the rest of the time, it just sits there soaking up insurance money and loan interest.

my first job, i didnt make 250 dollars a week. my mortguage is about 2000 a month, that is only 500 a week. think about that, 500 dollars a week for an apreciating asset and half that much again to drive an american car to work topay for that asset.

thats an increadable amount of your disposable income to fork over. especialy if your making les than 30k a year.

the rest of the world understands this. most americans dont. kind of like the whole Iraqi war thing. the rest of the world understands the stupidity of our actions, most americans dont.

True but because of advancing technology the price to produce ethanol would decreace over time. While the cost of gas is just going up over time.

The methods of ethanol conversion assumed for this forecast varied across technological scenarios and were chosen according to their potential for cost reduction. Cumulative cost savings as a result of process improvements were based on NREL projections for each technology,47 calculated from a base conversion cost of $0.91 per gallon. Currently, there are several projects underway to produce ethanol from cellulose using either concentrated or dilute sulfuric acid hydrolysis technology. The low technology case assumed that the technology would continue to be used throughout the forecast period, and that process improvements would provide cost savings of 16 cents per gallon of ethanol by 2015. The countercurrent hydrolysis approach was chosen for the reference case technology. The countercurrent process improves on the dilute acid process, providing potential production cost savings of 30 cents per gallon of ethanol by 2015. The most advanced conversion process, with the greatest potential for cost reduction, is the enzymatic hydrolysis process. This process was assumed for the high technology case, with production cost savings of 60 cents per gallon of ethanol by 2015. Figure 8 compares ethanol price projections in the three technology cases with motor gasoline prices in the reference, low, and high world oil price cases.

www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biomass.html




http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/fig_8.html