The_Tick says:

@ #18, Deregulation has chiefly made speculation the driving factor on oil prices. The fact that the price has been steadily rising as the world economy has been drastically declining should have given you your first clue.

Mextli says:

#21

Here is what Blooomburg has to say about it today and yes a lot is driven by speculation. Speculation is the essence of futures.

“Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), the world’s largest company by market value, posted its biggest first- quarter profit increase in eight years as surging energy demand and supply concerns pushed crude prices to a 30-month high.”

http://tinyurl.com/3fk2y4t

And more.

“In China, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil and gas after the U.S., demand for oil-based fuels such as diesel rose 11 percent during the first three months of this year, almost seven times the U.S.’s 1.6 percent growth rate, according to the International Energy Agency. Brazilian and Indian demand expanded by 5 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively.”

tjspiel says:

#20

It’s about 14 miles round trip but sometimes I’ll take the long way home so it can go up to 20. No, I don’t take an 85 year old mom to work with me.

I do know people who ride 20 miles or more each way 3 to 4 times a week.

I’ve ridden in weather as cold as -20 F and and about 4 inches of unplowed snow. Any deeper than that and I’ll take the train because riding in that much snow is too damn hard. I have two sets of studded tires for use in snow and ice. They work pretty well but slow you down quite a bit.

Personally I use a car when I have to haul much stuff but there are people who commute as far as I do or more and are “Car Free”. A regular bike with a rack and grocery panniers works fine for a couple of bags worth. More than that you need a cargo bike or trailer.

It started as a challenge to myself to see if I could do it once a week. Figured out that I liked it. I purposely moved closer to work to make it more practical from a time standpoint. It’s much less aggravating than sitting in traffic and I’ve gotten my exercise for the day just by going to work and back.

Plus I put barely any miles on my car and could give a crap what gas costs.

It’s not BS

The_Tick says:

@ #23 Well if the Msm and exxon says, then it must be true. Either that or they might not want to come right out and say how deep they are burried in your ass. I will leave it to you when to jump off of the “free market is working” train.

LibertyLover says:

#22, Yes.

Corporations don’t pay taxes. Their customers do.

Unfortunately, customers are too fracking stoopid to realize it.

So much for not taxing the middle class . . .

The really funny part of this whole mess is Obama took the statement out of context. The company said that with the profits it made it would be able to start exploiting the resources here at home instead of overseas (hint, local job creation?).

All Obama heard was, “We made lots of money!”

tjspiel says:

#30

Yes, automation allows us to build more crap we don’t need for less money all while requiring fewer workers. In other words, fewer jobs that pay a decent wage.

Air nailers and other automations let you build a house twice as big, twice as fast with half the workers. The average home built in 2004 was 2,400 sq ft. In 1970 it was 1,400. This even though family sizes have gotten smaller. 1,000 extra square feet to heat and cool even though most of the space is unoccupied most of the time.

This is progress? It’s waste.

So we need a more educated populace for the information economy of the future? Maybe. Look at Egypt though. Plenty of highly educated people with zero prospects for work. Think a more democratic government will fix that? I have my doubts.

CrankyGeeksFan says:

The Deepwater Horizon was conducting exploratory drilling. I don’t think oil from there would have arrived at oil refineries for years.

#2 Taxed Enough Already Dude- “reaped billions of tax revenue drilling for our own oil.” Only if oil companies can make a profit. In the US, that means a high oil price.

#6 deowll – That’s why we need urban planning. Remember: It’s suburban sprawl and exurban sprawl not urban sprawl that’s the problem. Too many distant suburban and exurban destinations are built with limited road carrying capability. The US needs to get off the automobile. That’s the addiction. The US can’t support its road network as it is today. In the next 35 years, the population will grow to approx. 400 million people. It’s like it is in alternative FOOD. It’s not what is eaten but what is not eaten. Don’t eat the High fructose corn syrup, high saturated fats, gluten, and sugar.

#7 tjspiel – Less than 50% of the commuters to downtown Minneapolis drive themselves in automobiles with only one occupant. That means car pools, mass transit, bicycles, walking, etc. There is even a bridge to the downtown area that is only for bicycles & pedestrians.
In Tampa, there are four bridges to downtown over the Hillsborough River. One bridge’s surface was renovated with federal stimulus funds and another is having its drawbridge machinery replaced entirely. No word on anything similar to the Minneapolis alternative vehicle bridge proposal yet.

tjspiel says:

#32 That was an interesting article but I think you took away the wrong message. Aggregate energy use per capita has stayed flat the last couple of decades after a steady rise in earlier decades. One reason suggested was due to the shift of more and more manufacturing over seas.

When they looked at household energy use, that has been relatively flat lately too in-spite of growing size of the house. Maybe that was your point. But they went further. They broke it down. Electric use (per capita) within the home has increased steadily but that has been offset by a drop in natural gas use. This drop has been explained in a few ways. One is the shift in the population toward the South (due to losses of manufacturing jobs in the North perhaps?) and another is more efficient heating systems and better insulated homes (the industry I work in by the way)

Even though I think it’s a good document it fails to account for a lot of energy consumption. These big houses aren’t empty shells. They’re filled with more furniture, more clothes, more vehicles in the garage, more.. everything. All which required energy to produce and more often than not, energy to ship from some other part of the world. Then there’s the increased energy and materials used to build the larger house itself, – also not accounted for in the article.

The article looked at gasoline use too. The amount per capita has gone up even with more efficient cars. The amount per vehicle has gone down but the number of vehicles we own has increased to more than compensate.

Food? We eat more too. Look at some photos of people from the 50s, 60, and 70s. Then compare them to photos today. People in the U.S are fatter. There’s no doubt about it.

To address your first point, I’m not a Luddite. I work in the energy efficiency field and I think there’s a lot that technology can do to help. The problem is that so far whatever gains we make in terms of increasing the efficiency of various systems, it’s nearly always offset by increasing consumption.

Increasing consumption unfortunately has become part of our culture and the health of our economy has been set up to depend on it. It wasn’t always that way. The article has a section on “Why Does Consumption Go Up” that’s also very interesting.

LibertyLover says:

#35, The problem is that so far whatever gains we make in terms of increasing the efficiency of various systems, it’s nearly always offset by increasing consumption.

Bingo!

I read a book a few years ago that explained that exact concept. The whole book was dedicated to that and that alone.

But for the life of me, I can’t remember the name. Sigh.

The conclusion was that by making things more efficient, we are really just increasing our energy use because it doesn’t take as much to do the same things.

For instance, your comment about the more fuel efficient cars, if you can drive 500 miles and it’s cheaper than it was 10 years ago, you’ll spend more time traveling that distance. It’s human nature to want more.

Arrg. I can’t explain it as well as that book did. I’ll find it Monday at work and post the name. As someone in the industry you will get a good read out of it, I guarantee it.

CrankyGeeksFan says:

#35 tjspiel – First paragraph: Iron has to be melted in order to make steel. The melting point of iron is 1538 °C (2800 °F). That’s a lot of energy right there.

Second paragraph: Florida experienced explosive growth in population from the early 1970s onwards that relates to the creation of the rust belt. Florida homes generally don’t have natural gas due to limited supply since there was only one pipeline coming down the west coast of the state from the Louisiana/Texas region. Homes built as late as the 1960s in the Tampa Bay area had furnaces. These would be replaced by heat pumps since almost all homes have air-conditioning.

From 2008 to 2009, US electric energy consumption declined for the first time from year to year since the late 1950s.

Third paragraph: Plywood from Brazil and drywall from China made its way to Florida homes in great amounts in the last 10 years. “Greening” an existing structure is usually more green than building a new structure. As George Carlin was remarked: The home is a place for your stuff.

Fourth paragraph: Increased gasoline consumption would be due to people driving farther to get anywhere.

Do you think that if homes went to three-phase wiring it would prove to be more efficient?

#36 tjspiel – In Copenhagen, Denmark, people commute to the airport on bicycles even in the rain.

#37 LibertyLover – That’s why the US needs to break its addiction to the AUTOMOBILE. Too much time lost in commuting no matter what the energy source.