Boohunney is a longtime reader and commenter from the Great State of Georgia. She’ll be checking in occasionally.
Dear Cheryl:
I MUST respond to your social media rant that having a gas hog is an ‘merican right offline.
In the past, freedom was not free. And it wasn’t meant to fill cars up with gas or for commodities. It WAS about freedom. In WWII people had to recycle, grow victory gardens, men were DRAFTED (and BTW, I am FOR reinstating the draft), gas was rationed (OMG! In our lifetime they talked about it during the embargo in the 1970’s.) Textiles went to the military first, so dungarees were expensive and the patches that were on your own clothes were worn with pride. People volunteered. Women rolled bandages and were members of the Red Cross.
I could go on. But, it seems to me ‘mericans think being supportive of FREEDOM is buying a magnetic yellow ribbon from China for a huge old hunky gas hog and wars are fought to keep a few folks rolling in dough.
Just sayin’.
With all due respect,
Boohunney
P.S. Bowling with Sherri Stately Ayers next week? Call me!
The base price of a barrel of oil is set by OPEC and the oil speculators (Wall Street bankers who said they would make Obama “pay” for his rejection of the XL oil pipeline from Canada). At $105.00 per barrel (42 gallons in a barrel) the price per gallon of oil is $2.50 ($105.00 divided by 42). Add to that refinery costs, transportaion costs, brokerage fees, retailers profit, and local, state and federal taxes. That’s another $1.50 per gallon. $2.50 + $1.50 = $4.00 per gallon at the pump. You can drill everywhere and anywhere until the cows come home and the price of gasoline will continue to rise because the entire system is fixed. By OPEC and the Wall Street speculators who know control about 60% of the worlds oil supply.
I KNOW THAT Imhotep. The more we drill, the less they drill. Let me get all conspiracy on you. Don’t ya thank that if we use up our reserves we’ll be in the palm of the evil people’s hands???? Huuummmm?
And a rhetorical question – don’t we have some responsibility for generations that (might try to)come after us to save some commercial scale volumes of oil for them?
Oil can be a great building block for long-lasting and/or vital products, such as petrochemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc.
Shouldn’t we save some for those purposes, and for those who come after us? It seems practically sinful to blow through it all simply as fuel.
I hear people talk about “oh, if we drill this, and frack that (yeah – frack that), we’ve got 100 years left of oil and gas”.
Oh. Doing what with it? Just burning it all and leaving future generations with nothing? What kind of a legacy is that?
Someone could argue it is a “freedom” to burn it all up. It might be such a freedom. But future generations would be well within their rights to curse us.
Boohunney, it’s more likely and less conspiritorial to think that the rich just want to get richer. They don’t much care where the oil is. When we have none the 1% will just take our big old military (which will be much more technologically sophisticated by then) and invade the guy who still has oil and take it. Here’s an interesting fact. The largest U.S. export today is gasoline. Where do you suppose all of that oil is coming from for us to refine? And why do you suppose that Iran can’t beg, borrow or steal an oil refinery?