Call me twisted...
 

Call me twisted...but I'm pretty happy that gas prices have skyrocketed in California. Even if it's only temporary, maybe it will help open people's eyes

i agree. i hate paying more for gas, but i am getting a degree in Engineering with an emphasis on Energy. so it all works out :)

Its good that it may encourage more efficient behaviour - even if that tends to be temporary at best - but also bad as it hits a lot of folks struggling to get by quite hard.

twisted. necesity and inventions comes to mind; fender skirts..... boattails.... crxs and metros and all kinds of "econo-boxes" sky rocket in price also.

what does your daughter drive?:confused:

Exactly! I see the interviews with people who "can't afford" these gas prices, and maybe 8 out of 10 are driving fairly new vehicles, often SUVs or big pickups. So I have to wonder how those folks could afford the new vehicles (or payments), but not the fuel.

FWIW, I consider myself fairly well-off, but one of my two vehicles is a 2000, the other is an '88.

Maybe (the more the better) some peoples' eyes, but the standard procedure when fuel prices go up is to complain, protest and/or pray. You'll notice a lot of new members on Ecomodder and similar forums, most of them post 1-3 times, something along the lines of: I've got a big SUV which I drive 1.5 blocks to the store a few times a day. I want to get better FE, but I'm not willing to modify the car nor change my driving habits...

2008 didn't open their eyes ...
Back then, crude prices were more than half again as much as today.

Here it was mentioned recently in the papers that for the first time people start to drive less because of gas prices. For years the average annual distance driven per car was around 13.000 km, now it is reducing. However people mostly skip the visits to relatives so the writer of the article got worried over lonely grannies sitting and waiting for (grand)children that do not visit anymore....Sad as that may be....on my daily commute I mostly see cars with only one occupant....Huge potential in cost savings there (personal experience).

It did - somewhat. For a few months. There was a waiting list for Toyota Prii in the US in mid-late 2008. Then fuel prices went down and most people forgot about it. Then came the "Cash For Clunkers" program. And a few more people bought more fuel-efficient vehicles.
I can't speak for anyone else's situation, but I spend a LOT more of my income feeding myself than I spend feeding and maintaining my vehicles. I spend more on property taxes than I spend on vehicle fuel. I may even spend more on ethanol than I spend on E10 gasoline. :p

Heck, I spend more feeding and maintaining my horse than I do on gas & repairs for the vehicles. The dogs probably run about even with them.

Ethanol for personal use is nowhere close, though. What can I say? I'm just a cheap date, can't tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the $3.99 a bottle Trader Joe's special.

I spent an average of 50 cents/day for groceries July-Sept., but it's gonna go up from that.

fifty cents a day frank lee, why the wind most likely will blow you away. you must have a truck garden, we do. green---s

HA! It would have to be a mighty, mighty strong wind!

And I spent $1.50/day average on eating and drinking out during that period... that's one of the bigger money wasters.

In the U.S. we had an event called huricane katrina back in 2005.
It shut down oil wells in the gulf of mexico and refineries in the gulf cost states.
Supply, demand and panic drove the price of gas to closer to $4/gal (when adjusted for inflation).
When the country didn't implode after paying $3.50+/gal (prices at the time) for a few weeks I knew that sooner rather than later $3+/gal gas would be the norm.
I was working out side the U.S. when it happened. When I got back state side in 2006 I went to work finding my diesel.

Now we are headed towards $4/gal gas.
Our Department of Energy projections says by 2014 we will be paying $4/gal. I think they are right.

The rich live as if they were poor, and the poor live as if they were rich.

It's annoying, but I get better mpg rowing through gears in rush hour traffic than traveling a steady 70mph on the freeway. Not suggesting a manual is a good option for LA traffic, but it can be done.

And I thought I was frugal. Are you on a Ramen diet? I'd like to know how to get down to 50 cents a day.

Almost no Ramen; I have a few pretty good scavenging spots, but for some reason bidnesses with good scavenging would much rather see all that good stuff go in the landfill... if I am so effective at recycling that they notice, they do all kinds of things to sabotage their cornucopias. :rolleyes:

CA is averaging over $4.60 this week. In my area, it seems like most places are over $5.00. Makes me glad I'm getting high-40s for MPG.

-soD

Im driving the 4cyl toyota techoma and just shortfilled at 4.87 to top it off.

What gets me is the sense of entitlement we have regarding cheap fuel. I read an article on Bloomberg this morning which quoted several Californians at gas stations saying things like, "It's outrageous!" and, "I don't understand it." Even though this spike is temporary, the long-term trend is obvious: finite natural resource+increasing worldwide demand (especially Asia)=prices go up, and will go up until we run out of the stuff. To be blunt, people like Old Mechanic's daughter who have premised their living arrangements and commutes on cheap gasoline forever will have to make tough decisions about how to restructure their lives in the future; we all will. We will also see the ramifications of this not just in pump prices, but in every other aspect of our economy that depends on oil, from farming and commodities, to food prices at the local grocery store (those products didn't magically appear there, after all--every calorie of food energy in a grocery store represents roughly seven calories of oil energy invested in its production and distribution). There's an argument to be made for high gas prices being bad on an individual level inasmuch as they introduce hardship, but on a societal level they're in our best interest if we respond appropriately and change how we use and think about energy. The writing's on the wall, to borrow an analogy from the Old Testament. The question is: who's reading it?

Excellent post Vman455. The sense of entitlement in the US culture really makes me sick.

Years ago when gas jumped from .60 L to 85 cents a liter the morning highway commute traffic slowed to 60 mph from 80mph, it was a sight to see both lanes of traffic going slow, the slow drivers were influencing the fast drivers, gas prices was influencing them all. That lasted for about a month then back to business as usual:confused:

If the only thing a human could eat was carrots, what do you think carrots would cost?

What really bothers me is not the sense of entitlement, but what seems to be an absolute inability to do forward planning for any period longer than the next paycheck (if that - see the rise of "payday loan" businesses, AKA loan sharks).

Let's suppose that there really is lots of oil, and it's some great conspiracy by oil companies, evil liberal treehuggers, the Trilateral Commission, or whoever to keep raising prices. Well, so what? The conspiracy isn't going to blush and sheepishly admit "OK, you caught us, we'll roll back the price to 99 cents/gallon tomorrow." Prices are going to go up. Why not recognize that and prepare for it? But no, gotta spend every dime they make, and as much as they can borrow, too.

It's called Human Nature. :)

Seems that there are folks in life who are going to learn the term, "planning ahead" one way or another. They go to a store and think "gosh, if I could only get that, my life would be happy", and so it goes.

I suppose we all have that very same thing in some sort of way or another.

I look at life as a "big experiment" and we're all here to learn stuff.

And as you pointed out, you (and we) are in the planning stages for lowering our fuel consumption. It also appears as though others will take a little longer. :)

The less I worry about it, the better I feel, since we certainly have the means of getting our cars over 100 mpg in the near future, if not already in the present.

Just my ramblings, Jim.

A recent article in the NY Times had this graph:
Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts - Graphic - NYTimes.com

Showing car safety (deaths per 100k people) vs miles driven per capita for the USA. Miles per capita have been slowly decreasing since 2004. It's not the only decrease, but it is the only decrease of more than a few years.

So that makes me not human. I've long suspected that, but it's nice to have proof :-)

Twisted is not exactly the word I would use for someone who is happy about peoples hardships.

The thing is those hardships are very commonly (not exclusively) brought on by people's incredible lack of foresight and common sense. For those which that is true, I don't have much sympathy. Nothing else seems to matter unless you start draining their wallet.

^ What he said!

I got some laughs at work today when I said, " Gasoline prices don't bother me! I just pay for it with a credit card!"

And I pay off my credit card bills every month, and I have no vehicle payments, and I have no mortgage payments.

But I'm getting screwed on my taxes because I don't have any mortgage interest to deduct. (according to some people) :rolleyes:

The dim bulbs that end up on the 6 o'clock saying that it costs a bunch to fill up their Ford Extinction are not the only ones that are hit in the wallet.

Come to my area (southern Ontario, Canada), gas is $1.33/ liter today, = $5.05 per US gallon.. :(

I like "schaudenfreude" myself. :thumbup:

You call that high ? :D

UK price per litre is £1.38 just now, which equates to £5.47 per us gallon (3.78 litres).

At $1.60 to £1 thats about $8.35 USD per gallon

or 8.14 Canadian dollars a US gallon.

I agree, and for those who are living reasonable lives and doing what they can I do have sympathy. However, I also believe this is very VERY few people. Even people who can barely afford rent seem to have a sense of entitlement. I know way too many people that have stupidly large vehicles for their income and needs/uses. I could probably argue its the majority of people I know, sadly.

The thing that really sucks is if we can't convince the majority to reduce their fuel usage the problem is only going to continue to get worse. Thankfully, in the past couple years the OEMs have really been working to increase mileage. That is the only thing that is reducing our usage currently, and its only by a couple percent.

I don't get pleasure from people's hardships by any means. That's definitely not what I was getting at. Most of these problems are only a problem because of the people themselves. I go to school with many kids who drive trucks that get 15 MPG and SUV's that get 20. They drive like typical teenagers, and then they complain that most of their paychecks go to gas. Their logic is completely backwards.

my brother was one of em except he was getting 13mpg on a good day. His 2nd year of commuting to college and bought the escort in my garage for 900usd it over doubled his mileage and in fuel savings the car paid for itself within 2 years. This meant he still had his truck to have fun with .

Looking at the larger picture, those people who are now experiencing temporary hardship were, not so long ago, taking pleasure in creating hardship for the rest of us (and ultimately themselves). So while I might not actually take pleasure in their predicaments, I do see it as the working out of... Well, call it karma - or maybe carma :-)

I worked with a truck guy for a while. got him to track his mileage. then did the math for him, he parked the truck, got a 1000 dollar economy car and has not looked back. He is not the first nor the last person to see the light.

A little good hearted ribbing about the monetary aspects (environmental aspects just get tuned out and dismissed) coupled with some information goes a long way.