Gas Rage In Staten Island

Have you ever heard of the word 'sarcasm'? Look it up sometime.

Jasper

The SPR isn't gonna do dick. It's mostly crude, and that's not the bottleneck. There aren't enough refineries to satisfy demand. You can up refinery capacity elsewhere, but it's gonna take weeks at best for those tankers to arrive -- and they don't have a port to dock in anymore, either.

Jasper

Since the Feds didn't do anything to 'force' conservation, via CAFE standards, the market will do it for them. I feel no pity for the 'big three', everytime I see a 'gotta have a Hemi' commercial...and fat america bought into it with both feet.

As was pointed out by Mike J...high prices won't curtail driving but scarcity of fuel will..and that's next.

Yer an idiot Bob. Art isn't the typical fat-assed american I was talking about and you know it. Am I supposed to say it's OK for Art to have a big SUV, sure it is...maybe you own one too, and drive with yer cell phone surgically attached to your ear...

That's actually logically inconsistent. Scarcity of fuel only curtails driving by the mechanism of making price higher. The situation is in flux right now, but a week or two from now, the demand will be fairly stable and the supply will also be stable at a lower level than before. You're unlikely to see "no fuel at any price" situations, since, hello! There is still fuel. Just less of it.

Jasper

Even so, Art would be a lot better off fuelwise and spacewise with a minivan than with his SUV.

Jasper

Well IMHO what needs to happen is that the world needs to start weening itself off fossil fuels altogether. France gets 75 to 80% of their electricity from nuclear. And as far as I know they have never had an accident. Are the French better that the Americans?

Ken

Nope but in USA the Nimby's are voiced better. Great Britain is planning to built 8 super Nuclear plants big enough to supply entire country. So they are no longer depending on foreign oil for electricity. Nuclear technologies has improved way beyond the 1970's and can now be used 100% safe.

At one time the US operated about 150 more small nuclear power plants than now, none with an 'accident'. Damn NIMBYs

The correct Usenet term is "SARCAMS" -- how many times do I have to point this out?!?

Bill "my tubless tires are a tad low" S.

If there were only one oil company, sure. But a competitive market economy doesn't work that way. No-one can force the consumer to give him the same profits he made last year. Why? Imagine that Shell raises their prices by 10c/gal in order make more money. Well, Citgo don't and consumers flock to them, and Shell makes even less. So Shell lower their price.

Only collusion can keep prices artificially high. I do worry that we have fewer oil companies than before--they quite probably qualify as an oligopoly these days, and that can have collusion-like effects.

Collusion-'like'? Dude, the gas stations were until recent EU mandates one of the industries that had a government-supported pricing cartel over here. It doesn't even have to be a spoken agreement, it's nowadays just that gas stations sell their gas for "n cent less than Shell!", where n is

Jasper

The other sorta amazing thing that gets lost is that oil companies have an amazingly steady profit margin. Oil at $25 or $60 a barrell and they still make in the 6-8% range. So their profits obviously go up, but not because of gouging. If that was so, then the margins would be more volitile.

-- I didn't - in spite of ample warnings by sociologists from large Eastern Universities - foresee the need to have

Nuclear is good, however, the only thing I have against it is the tranporting of the used fuel to the proposed Yucca mountain storage facility(sp?)

Ken

Collusion and ignorance. The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense. 'common sense' buys Stupidly Useful Vehicles.

Have there been any significant transportation accidents? Or you mean the Yucca Mountain itself - then you're a NIMBY Luddite.

No not the mountain itself, I think that is a great way / place to store the stuff, my concern is the tranporting of the spent fuel.

Ken

Ken M wrote in

Nuclear is bad. Forget about transport of waste - the major problem centers around the need to store the waste *safely* for more than