Gasoline

Eh, well howduyuh like dat? | Today’s picture features the corner mascot of an Italian diner several blocks south of main on New York Avenue, Huntington. The assumption is that at one time this cockeyed fellow still had his hand and it once held a menu of the day’s specials. I do not know when or how he lost his hand, my best guess is that he just used it to pay for filling his gas tank.

 

Gasoline is up to $4.15 per gallon on Long Island. I totaled it up and with what I drive out of sheer necessity, not counting casual driving. We’re up to $200 a month and climbing. And my car gets excellent mileage. 30mpg minimum.

 

Our European friends have been paying six and seven dollars for the same amount for a long time now. We’re catching up to them, and quickly. Unfortunately the larger cities and urban settings will be the least effected. While these communities certainly do consume the majority of imported fuels, they also represent and contain the widest variety of alternatives. Long Island for instance. It’s not New York City, but it’s not Columbus, Kansas either. If tomorrow, gasoline shot to $400 a gallon I’d be okay here. Why? Because there’s a bus stop on every corner and a train station every twenty miles from here to the Hamptons. I can go anywhere within a considerable distance for often- not much more than ten dollars.

 

Rural communities that lack the population to financially maintain an effective public transportation system are forced to drive. Not only drive, but drive farther. Unlike in larger cities, finding basic resources requires traveling farther. The Midwest is a collection of states with open fields and miles between each house and town in many cases. In the city, a loaf of bread is a walk to the corner. In Kansas, it meant a long, steady drive to the nearest supermarket, often in the next suburban town.

 

The fortunate irony is that essentials like bread are produced not in urban cities, but in these rural farmlands. Higher cost of living for the farmer means charging higher for the bread produced which means that even us city-folk are going to be paying for the gasoline in some way or another. That is unless congress feels like repackaging the farm subsidy policies, and it’ll be a cold day in Jamaica when that happens.

 

So why is the cost of fuel rising so highly? One reason, and perhaps the most popular, is that all middle-eastern oil barons are greed-filled sadists hell bent on sapping every penny, farthing, and ruble from this great earth till they control it with absolute, unstoppable power in the form of the worlds largest and wealthiest monopoly.

 

I do not subscribe to this argument, because I think this already happened years ago. There is a contingent theory in the same vein as the first that assumes they just like watching us squirm in the inescapable iron grip they have us in. While I think that’s more likely… I’m still not convinced of it.

 

Three years ago, the worlds largest oil field, the Burgan gusher of Kuwait, began to wane. It’s usual daily output slumped, not much, only 300,0000 barrels per day. For a field that was expected to produce upwards of 2,000,000 barrels a day for the next forty years the Burgan field was immediately short a previously expected 4,380,000,000 barrels. At $100 a barrel sold, that’s a ridiculous FOUR TRILLION dollars, split over the forty years that’s 109 million lost every year.

 

But who cares right? That single field is still producing 1.7 million a day (perhaps slightly less since the report of its decline three years ago). This single field continues to be the most profitable piece of real estate in the universe. In the universe.

 

This is where the whole… greed-filled sadists argument is developed. The point of it all however is that from the immediate perspective of the oil barons, and from the more eventual perspective of the average consumer: OIL IS A LIMITED RESOURCE. IT IS GOING TO RUN OUT.

 

The 2005 article on the Burgan Oil field is one of numerous, scattered report of diminishing oil supplies worldwide. Though mostly in the middle east.

 

 

The fact that oil is running out doesn’t seem to deter them making a profit however, in fact I my assumption is that they’re going to jack the dollar signs as high as they can go while they’ve still got enough of the crude to sell because regardless of it’s eventual depletion, the middle east still produces more Texas Tea in one day than the remainder of the world could cough up in ten years and they’ve got us all by the nuts until that ratio changes, or we until finally undergo that oh so necessary paradigm shift to an alternative fuel.

 

Based on the rate of decay and the decline of fuel consumption (Yeah, fuel is so expensive we’re actually using less of it than we were last year. Go America, that’s not like you…) and also based an how fumed the planet is getting about the price at the pump, I’m betting just as they probably are that the former solution (alternative fuel) will arrive and break wide long before the oil fields run dry.

 

As an American, heck, as anyone who’s not an oil baron or a good friend of one, there isn’t a lot we can do to lower the price of fuel. Kudos to the US government for giving it a shot though. Thanks for attacking them and pissing them off and killing 100,000 people in the process pres, now we’re up to four fifteen a gallon, way to go.

 

Things that piss us off. | Burning Money

If you’re gonna eat five dollars. Why not set five BILLION dollars on fire?

 

However, there are things that we can do to help ourselves. For instance: This morning MSNBC posted an article concerning what some are calling a radical practice (more like a method) in driving called hypermiling. Hypermiling, as described by MSNBC, is how a regular guy named Wayne Gerdes coaxed mind-blowing 180 miles per gallon out of his Honda Insight. This hybrid car, while already being one of the most fuel efficient cars on the road, is quoted as producing nowhere near the mileage that Gerdes attained, boasting only a hardy 60+ MPG in Consumer Reports. I took an estimate. I’m getting about 30mpg in my Nissan Sentra. If I were getting 180mpg I’d be getting six times the mileage I’m currently getting. That divides the average miles per gallon six times and directly the price per gallon by the same split. This means that here in New York where the price at the pump is $4.15 a gallon, Wayne Gerdes is paying (relatively) only SIXTY-NINE cents.

 

So what is hypermiling? Wayne himself called it “sapping every last drop of fuel from your tank” with a combination of techniques like turning off the engine at lights and stops, coasting, never accelerating rapidly, knowing when a curve in the road will allow your car more centrifugal momentum and keeping your car as light as possible at all times. The entire method is about keeping your car moving with as little fuel demand as possible and when possible, using no fuel whatsoever. Know where the hills are and take them. Watch your mileage carefully and find what things improve it. Some extremist hypermilers go so far as to cone the front grille of the car to make it more aerodynamic. One even removed entire engine parts to lighten his vehicle.

 

Is it worth it? Ask a European. As the increase in gas prices drives us less into insanity and more into real financial straights the practicality of something like hypermiling becomes more and more appealing, even if it’s a little radical. The only thing we can count on is that the cost of moving around is getting higher and higher, and it will continue to do so, and that people will respond, either by reducing the amount of driving done and relying more on public transportation, by sucking every drop of petrol from a tank with a series of fuel-saving techniques, or by… yeah, starting a war and killing hundreds of thousands of people (yay us!)

 

Until that magic new fuel source is produced, all we can do, is all we can do.

 

40 Days…

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