Haven’t we had oil at $100 a barrel before, and not that many years ago? And yet fuel and energy prices were lower.
It’s almost as if the price the consumer pays has absolutely nothing to do with cost.
Yeah, but how are they supposed to keep record profits when their costs are so high. /s
Don’t forget, next year they need to hit 104% the amount they did this year. Crank up the prices!
Capitalism, working exactly as intended!
It’s actually pretty well correlated once you remove state taxes, which have increased significantly in some states like California. Mississippi gas, for example, is cheaper now than 2010, with respect to crude prices and discounted for inflation.
Gas was $100 a barrel under Bush. It was like $2 a gallon.
Dad said “Jesus criminey were not going anywhere for a week!”
V.V I paid 3.75 a gallon 3 days ago.
I remember seeing $5/gal under Bush. His last year had an average of $3.30 and peaked over $4… https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gasoline-prices-fared-under-last-190000869.html
yeah gas hasn’t been $2 a gallon for quite a long time in the United States
It was under $2/gal during the first summer with covid.
$2.17 briefly, when no one was driving
In the small rural town I was in it was literally a dollar a gallon. People went to buy gas just to get out of the house since everything else was being closed down.
Which state? $2 in 2001 is worth $3.46 today thanks to inflation.
But gas tax isn’t tied to inflation and it’s a fixed dollar amount per gallon (not a percentage), so $100/barrel should be relatively close to the same as it was in in the mid-2000s, yet it’s doubled.
Why do you think gas isn’t affected by inflation? Costs go up with inflation. This increases the price. Remember that the cost of the commodity itself is effectively zero. The cost is all in exploration, extraction, refinement, transport, and sale. All of that goes up with inflation.
The price per barrel includes almost all those expenses, so inflation should be reflected there.
The rest is offset by a gas tax that’s deflationary. The federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon hasn’t changed since 1993.
The price at the pump should be correlated much more strongly with the price of a barrel than with inflation, and the price per barrel was similar or higher during the Bush administration.
The price per barrel includes almost all those expenses, so inflation should be reflected there.
Right, which means that the inflation adjusted price of oil today is significantly lower than it was in 2008.
UK prices are currently around $7/gallon (US). You guys have it good!
From a European pov, petrol has been almost free for the longest time in the US.
deleted by creator
I imagine everything else became more expensive too, labor, shipping, processing, etc
labor
Wages haven’t been going up that much though. Not as much as inflation, not as much as prices. Shipping and processing costs, too, haven’t actually gone up significantly - there’s no particular reason for it to cost more to do the things we’ve already been doing.
this user gets it
Good! Make it $1000 a fucking barrel! Any developed nation who genuinely cares about the health of their economy will be highly motivated to get all the way off of oil.
It’s been fluctuating in and out of triple digits for many years now. The price is manupulated by those who profit the most. Never so high that we panic away from oil, but always high enough for record profits. Fuck oil.
I want it $1000 a barrel just because of all the train lines it would build. The first time I saw gas get over $5 I was in LA and they very quickly approved the new extensions people are enjoying today.
Exactly. We don’t ever seem to progress without extreme motivation.
Meanwhile in the UK we have to suffer with privatised Railways. Scum cunts, and that is because the older generation decided they didn’t want to pay tax towards it. Imagine having to pay £100 to go 300 miles on a train. Should be 20% of that.
As much as I would absolutely love us shifting from fossil fuels, it also needs to be practical. Suddenly increasing the price of gas doesn’t work for rural areas like the one I live in where your car is immensely important to you being able to get to the store or your job and we’re not in areas that public transport would be considered due to how small and spread out the towns are. And a lot of us don’t have the option to move closer to the cities and the transit opportunities either due to our jobs or just the cost of living required for the city versus our rural homes. We NEED to start working on infrastructure that doesn’t only have large cities in mind, but also us on the outskirts of the city or the rural communities will become even poorer than they are now when they have to pay a small fortune just to travel to the store or their jobs.
We need to get off fossil fuels ASAP, we also should probably wean away from car centricity, it’s making us dependent on these oil cartels. They have an oligopoly and they can just yank the prices up if they want and screw over everybody else.
it’s a very tall order there
In the US, it’s pretty much only Republicans who insist that we stay on the fossil fuel rollercoaster these days.
Agreed. Fuck cars
We could afford those tears by weening ourselves off fossil fuels.
deleted by creator
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oil prices are on track to reach $100 a barrel this month for the first time in 2023 after surging by almost 30% since June, after Russian and Saudi Arabian production cuts and rising demand from China.
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia extended 1.3m barrels per day (bpd) of combined cuts to the end of the year, accelerating a drawdown in global inventories.
The report was released just a day after Opec announced that the market was facing a deficit of more than 3m bpd in the upcoming quarter, potentially resulting in the most substantial supply shortage in more than a decade.
Saudia Arabia and its partners in Opec are also concerned that the IEA has predicted that demand for oil will peak before 2030, which some analysts believe could be brought forward to 2026 by the rapid switch to renewables already under way.
The rising cost of fuel and demand from the Chinese economy, which ranks as the world’s biggest oil importer, are expected to cloud the outlook for central banks and their mission to bring down inflation rates that are still well above the 2% target level.
US central bank interest rates were widely expected to have hit a peak after a drop last month in core inflation, which strips out volatile elements such as fuel and food.
The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Quick, increase interest rates! That will show them
Wish I knew what the oil cartels hope to achieve with this. It’s not as if we’re ever going to soften on support for Ukraine. Maybe just lashing out?
They’re cashing out. They know the jig is up and they’re not investing in new wells like they used to and are justenjoying the higher profit margin on the existing wells.
As well as the EV transition is going, we’re still decades away from them becoming the dominant consumer vehicle worldwide. Even further away for commercial vehicles, and further away still for shipping and planes. These countries are making hay while the sun is shining. If the West had any balls it would sanction the shit out of cartels like OPEC. Problem is, voters punish politicians who allow gas prices to rise, and OPEC knows this. We’re not willing to trigger a price war by enacting sanctions.
Super agree that they strongly prefer a certain stripe of US politician, understand our electorate, and pull their levers accordingly. It would be immense if we could short circuit that weakness in our democracy somehow. A green new deal would have done that, but the Dem party oldsters seem to hate that idea.
Honesty this is a good thing. Higher prices make transition away from oil mote profitable and it seems we’re only allowed to do things if they’re profitable. Maybe a good old fashioned oil.crisis is what.the world needs. We put up with 1973 style shit for a little while and then investments away from oil happen and then we never go back. We have tools we didn’t back then, like good wind and solar, ebikes, more developed transit networks in cities, etc. So it won’t even be as sucky
It was over 100 for months during winter too
