Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country.
But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.
Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.
People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.
I was talking to a small dairy farmer yesterday and she was worried about the impact of increased diesel fuel prices on the profit/loss balance of her and her husband’s farm operation.
Time for a Rhodes Car! http://www.rhoadescar.com/jumpshow.htm
I have about a 19 mile commute. Let’s see, at an average of 10 mph, my daily commute time would only be about 4 hours. So…my work day would only be 14 hours. I think I could just make it work. Of course, the kids will have to be satisfied with looking at a picture of me rather than actually seeing me during the work week, but hey, it’s all for the greater good. I mean, what’s good for the oil speculators is good for America. Business, after all, is business.
Let us be honest, we are the problem. We want others to pump and refine their oil for our benefit, we don’t do that in our back yard or off our coast or in the recreation areas of the Rich and Famous. No nuclear power plants for us. Don’t you under developed countries understand you are suppose to stay that way. That may have once worked but no more, demand is up and it will continue to go up. The world desire for a nicer life just like ours is going to continue, I lived through the “Carter” disaster and I have no desire to move into a cave or go back to being a hunter gatherer.
If you want to do any thing that will be effective, increase the potential for an oil gut. License drilling in the Gulf, on the coast and in the west. The speculators will bail and prices will fall rapidly. Then do the things that will lesson the demand, first build nuclear power plants and convert our massive supply of coal to auto fuel. This will stabilize prices and the when practical substitutes are available they will be used. The market does work, it did when Adam Smith lived and it works today. Don’t punish the producers reward them.
paul
Reward the producers? Sure, but remember who those producers are: Chavez of Venezuela, the Saudi Royal Family……who already have billions of U.S. dollars and other currencies and holdings. How much richer do you want to make them?
Support our OWN producers, instead…..and put the oil profiteering commodity speculators on notice that we’re sick and tired of them and their tactics! Arethey getting the message? I think some of them are.
In the discussion, let’s please remember that the Saudis (for many years now) only supply something like 12% of US oil and gasoline. The USA supplies come from the USA, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada. (That’s not in order of supply percentage.)
Even if we ‘supported our own producers’, the world commodities market will still be in operation. The key is: as long as the US dollar continues sinking (a la the Iraq sinkhole, courtesy the GOP neocons, Cheney & GW Bush), we in the US will be in BIG trouble.
Our currency is in terrible, terrible shape, and the alarming, dire ramifications of allowing it to become so bad are just beginning to shake out in the domestic economy. Most people simply weren’t paying attention until recently, just as they weren’t paying attention to a war abroad. Remember our Prez’s ‘call to arms’? He urged Americans to ‘go shopping’. Some leadership! Some mess!
I had to go down by the interstate today — there the BP station was $4.09 the highest I’ve seen in this area. It’s still $3.99 in town, though.
JE
I paid $4.50 today in Los Banos, California. One of the reasons why we pay more than most areas is the fact that our taxes for the maintenance, repair, and building of our roads is so high. We may pay for value received, but there IS a limit on what we’ll tolerate. Many of our roads are potholed and need repair, but CalTrans is on a hiring freeze, the state is broke (through financial finagling and gross mismanagement), and people are out of work.
We’re sick and tired of excuses……and we want short-term fixes while waiting for long-term results!
[blockquote]Time for a Rhodes Car![/blockquote]
Nope, it’s time for a [url=http://www.commutercars.com/]Tango[/url]. A bargain at $80,000, it does zero to 60 in 4 seconds and has an 80-mile range on lead-acid batteries. It’s the width of a motorcycle, so you can take it between lanes in a traffic jam. It also has a gi-normous sound system and leather interior. According to reviews I’ve seen, it will lay rubber.
The projected consumer versions are projected to cost $40,000, or $19,000 for the basic version (zero to 60 in a modest 7 seconds and a cloth interior).
Just don’t try to drive it on a freeway……unless you want to risk being blown off the road by any passing big rig! And I’d sure hate to get HIT in one!
And if my wife and I wanted to shop downtown in one, ONE of us would have to hold the groceries in our lap!
[i]has an 80-mile range on lead-acid batteries.[/i]
Which means most enviro’s will oppose it.
Hey, why is everyone on this blog ignoring the root of the problem: the US dollar has dropped about 40% since Cheney/Bush led us into the unbelievably enormous deficits we and our children and grandchildren will be paying off? It’s an ENORMOUS part of the problem! Even if we drilled everywhere, our domestic reserves simply won’t meet demand for very long at all.
We need to STOP funding the never-ending, impossible war of occupation in Iraq, and START addressing our domestic problems, including innovative ways of encouraging alternative energy sources. We’re Americans! We can do it — if we have a leader who inspires us to attempt it! I don’t care if what party that person represents, we NEED leadership!
[blockquote]Just don’t try to drive it on a freeway……unless you want to risk being blown off the road by any passing big rig! [/blockquote]
The Tango has all its weight between the wheels — that’s the battery compartment — so it corners at high speeds much better than the typical SUV. That means it’s also stable to the slipstream from semis. Check out the videos at the Tango’s website. This car was built by people who build electric racing cars.
And even the little three-wheeler one-seaters have enough cargo space for a “cartful” of groceries. The Tango has a little more than that, IIRC.
[blockquote]I’d sure hate to get HIT in one![/blockquote]
If you’re paranoid about collisions, buy yourself an armored car. Has the added benefit of a turret mounted machine gun, so you can take out your road rage. Geez Looeez.
BTW, lead-acid batteries are fully and easily recyclable. And you can outfit any electric car with NiCads or Li-ion batteries if you prefer; the Tango uses lead-acid because that’s the most reliable technology. (The other types of battery have a much longer lifetime, though.)
Actually, the big drop in the soundness of the dollar only happened since the Democrats took control of Congress.
That could explain their approval rating of less than 13%, less than half as high as that of the President.
NWO,
You might be right, after all, there seems to be little concern except by conservatives on the amount of mercury tons of (soon to be mandatory) compact flourescent bulbs will release into the environment.
[blockquote]there seems to be little concern except by conservatives on the amount of mercury tons of (soon to be mandatory) compact flourescent bulbs will release into the environment[/blockquote]
That’s mostly because conservatives can’t count; witness the past eight years of federal budgets.
From [url=http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/what_about_merc.php]treehugger.com[/url]:
[blockquote]compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don’t contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America’s air and water results from the burning of … coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent.[/blockquote]
See the graph on the page. There are 4 mg of metallic mercury in a CF bulb; while this is not negligible, it’s not going to make you start twitching and drooling. Most houses built more than a decade ago have more mercury vapor than that running around from broken mercury thermometers, where the mercury has collected in cracks in the subfloor.
When old chemists such as myself start dropping dead from all the mercury vapor in the cracks in our lab floors, and we switch all our power generation to nukes and renewables, then you can come back and tell me how bad the mercury from compact fluorescent bulbs is.
By the way, to be fair, mercury toxicity is a real concern — but not from metallic mercury unless you are playing with pounds and pounds of the stuff. It’s the organomercury compounds that result from bacterial action on metallic mercury that are the problem.
So don’t steal 50 pounds of mercury from a locked factory and spend the next month playing with the stuff, as happened in Colorado. Don’t dispose of half-a-ton per year of mercury in the local bay, as happened in Japan. And for God’s sake don’t eat seed wheat, labeled “not for human consumption,” that’s been sprayed with an organomercury fungicide, as happened in Iraq.
But there’s no reason to be paranoid about CF or any other fluorescent bulbs. Insitutional users have used fluorescent tubes for decades; how many folks have been poisoned by them?
Actually, CFBs do release more mercury than coal fired plants — in areas not served by coal fired plants! Many areas have hydro-electric or natural gas electric plants. 🙂
Well, what are the numbers? Coal is about 50-55% of US electricity generation; natural gas is much more expensive and tends to be used for makeup generators (for example, solar thermal plants use natural gas at night). Since electricity is all on the national grid, you can’t really say “my electricity doesn’t have any coal generation in it.” Electricity is fungible, like oil; and 50% plus of US electricity generation — your electricity and my electricity — emits mercury.
Anyhow, the mercury in CF bulbs (or other fluorescents) is not a serious danger; most of it — when not recycled — stays in landfills. Mercury from burning coal is emitted into the atmosphere and ends up in, for example, lake fish. So burning more electricity to run your incandescent bulbs is a greater mercury hazard than the 4 mg of mercury in a CF. Even if you break it, you won’t be poisoned any more than you get poisoned when you break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer. Less, actually, because there’s a lot more mercury in a thermometer.
Mercury in landfills tends to either seep into the water supply through the ground, or leech into rivers. We are having a problem here now, where the landfill and water treatment plants are both contributing to contamination of Wakulla Springs. (The Ecological/Geological survey blamed both sources.) I don’t believe Mercury is one of the chemicals mentioned (I heard it on the local news, and they don’t tend to go heavy into details), but if other chems are present, that is an indication that anything buried in landfills contribute to soil and water pollution.
Also, with so many communities building on top of landfills for golf courses, commercial sites, even recreational areas and playgrounds, I would think that this WOULD be a concern.
JE
By the way, you have to multiply one bulb by thousands (if not millions) if they are going to become mandatory replacements for ‘regular’ bulbs. We have over 30 in our house alone, using them everywhere except in ‘chandelier’ bulb fixtures, which because of their TOP size, even the chandelier base sized CFBs are too big to fit (too long and wide) the fixture.
JE
I know about the problem with bulb sizes; it’s improving. I just installed a ceiling fan in my son’s room that uses chandelier bulbs; CF chandelier bulbs fit into the spaces there just fine. One other, underappreciated point: CFs allow you to install much brighter bulbs than the fixture is rated for, because the CF equivalent of a 100-watt incandescent only draws about 25 watts. I routinely use “60W-equivalent” (15-watt) CF bulbs in 40W light fixtures such as desk lamps.
As for the rest: quantities, quantities. 30 CF bulbs in your home @ 4 mg each = 120 mg. That is far less than breaking one mercury thermometer (a couple of thousand milligrams), even if you smashed all your CFs at the same time in the same room. How bad did you get poisoned when you dropped a thermometer as a child?
Leach rates from landfills tend to be much lower than the direct injection of mercury from coal-burning. Leach rates also depend on mobility; metallic mercury isn’t very mobile in soil, AFAIK, because it’s pretty stable to corrosion except by certain bacteria; and landfills, despite everyone’s best efforts, tend to be so sterile that e.g. carrots survive in them for decades. Besides, CFs can be recycled; don’t you recycle? My church, in my little 1200-citizen town, sponsors a visit from the local recycling center once a month. Many such places take fluorescent tubes for recycling: mercury is valuable because (like gold) almost all of it has already been mined. There are also annual household-hazardous-waste collection days.
I looked for light bulb sales figures and couldn’t find any, but again, the fact is that fluorescent lights have been used (as energy and therefore money savers) in institutions for many, many years. Most of the tubes have ended up in the trash, and they have a lot more mercury than CFs because they’re bigger. I really don’t think it’s a major problem; there are lots of more serious problems (like the concentration of natural radioactives in coal fly ash which often makes it low-level nuclear waste) that are ahead of this one.
I swear, some of you people sound just as old-womanish as the lefty greens. “OMG, fluorescents give off UV!” (Yep, the UV is captured by the coating on the inside of the tube and re-emitted — “fluoresced” — as visible light. That’s why they call ’em “fluorescent lights.” Incidentally, normal glass — that’s what the tubes are made of — is opaque to UV.) “OMG, fluorescents contain tiny amounts of mercury!” (Living things are able to deal with small amounts of almost anything, including botulism toxin — “botox” — and cyanide — almonds and peach pits.) Tell me again how dangerous 4 mg of mercury is, when you park your gi-normous SUV that’s busy pumping out nitrogen oxides and thus contributing to the high ozone, hence asthma, rates all over the country, including bucolic NW Ohio. (The more fuel you burn, the more nitrogen oxides you emit. It’s a consequence of living in 80% nitrogen.)
Really, it’s not that big a deal: not as big a deal as saving resources (and money) by using 70% less electricity. I’ll be happy to abandon CFs when LED fixtures become as good as CFs are now; for one thing, LEDs last almost forever. But until then, I think it’s better stewardship — and less environmentally toxic, all things considered — to use CFs rather than incandescents.
Actually, I’m kind of offended by your use of “OM–” we all know what it stands for an is offensive to those who love the name of the Lord, whether using “God” or “Lord” as a title or substitute for “The Name”.
Since the ‘jury’ is still out on the effects of mercury, and there is more evidence for the harmful effects (have you ever read the EPA guidelines for dealing with a broken CFB??? They say you actually should call in a Hazardous Waste Unit!) of the same, shouldn’t we err on the side of safety?
By the way, multiply 30 bulbs @ 4mg by 52,000, the population of a rural county or large city, and you get a better idea of the amounts. One household — meh. But a city of 50 – 100,000 or even 1,000,000! How much would you consider before the numbers get to where it IS significant?
By the way, I don’t have a SUV. I have a Dodge Caravan, my wife has a Suzuki Aerio. and unless you are totally mobile on bike or skateboard, even a Prius puts out emissions.
chow!
Jim
That’s one thing I puzzle over with the leftist enviros, they are so quick to come down on an existing technology, that is cleaner now than at any other time in past history, and which is becoming cleaner every year thanks to regs they helped pass, yet they will jump on the bandwagon for any new “clean” technology that is untested for the long run effects.
What’s wrong with hallogen, by the way?
[blockquote]have you ever read the EPA guidelines for dealing with a broken CFB??? They say you actually should call in a Hazardous Waste Unit![/blockquote]
I tend to take that sort of thing with a grain of salt; there’s been a lot of penny-wise and pound-foolish going around in that vein — for example, ripping intact asbestos insulation (inside walls) out of public buildings, and in the process [b]creating[/b] the very dust hazard that was being worried about.
Yes, mercury is toxic. But for heaven’s sake, EPA says you should call HazMat if you spill half a pint of motor oil, too! That’s the amount you get when you change the oil in your push mower. Used motor oil is toxic, too; it’ll kill your grass quite effectively. But it’s not HazMat toxic in such small quantities.
Have you seen the MSDS for table salt? Or sugar?
As I noted previously, if we really thought mercury was such a hazard, we’d abandon houses built before about 1995 and rip them all down inside a HazMat containment structure. Such houses almost certainly have small amounts of mercury in the subfloor from broken thermometers — more than 4 mg, which is barely visible, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Then there are old hospitals, where a history of broken thermometers is a certainty… shouldn’t they all be shut down?
As to significant amounts caused by mandating the bulbs — I’ll agree with you there. If the Feds are going to mandate CF bulbs, the Feds also need to make sure there are recycling and household hazardous waste collection programs in place to take them on.
It is a shame that the EPA is so stringent about such miniscule amounts. It promotes contempt for all regulations among those who know something, and paranoia among those who don’t. For example, a lot of folks are terribly concerned about their old amalgam dental fillings, which present no hazard at all unless you die and are cremated.
If you want to compare what we’re talking about to a man-sized mercury exposure, consider that Sam Clemens spent several weeks working 10 hours a day extracting precious metals from ore in Nevada, using pounds and pounds of mercury to amalgamate the gold and silver. See [i]Roughing It[/i]. It didn’t appear to affect him very much. That’s one reason that I really doubt that metallic mercury is as toxic as it’s made out to be.
[b]Organomercury compounds[/b] are quite toxic indeed. A few milligrams of methylmercury, absorbed through the skin, can be lethal. Metallic mercury, not so much.
According to Hazard.com’s database, the very lowest published toxic airborne concentration (and it was phytotoxic, in mice, rather than directly toxic) is 1 mg per cubic meter, and most quoted values are more than ten times higher. One broken CF in a house will release mercury very slowly (its rate of evaporation is quite low). Even if it all vaporized at once (a hot bulb exploding, for example), my living room is about 3x2x3 meters, or 18 cubic meters; maximum concentration there from a broken CF is about 0.25 mg per cubic meter. Most houses are leaky enough that this will not be a problem because it will dissipate quickly; if it concerns you, open a window for an hour or two.
[blockquote]What’s wrong with hallogen, by the way?[/blockquote]
Halogen bulbs are just super-duper incandescent bulbs; they still put out the vast majority of their energy as heat, even though you gain 10% or so in efficiency over an incandescent. (10% of 10% brings the efficiency of a halogen bulb up to a whopping 11%, versus better than 30% efficiency for a fluorescent (and 50-75% for an LED).
There’s a reason that a 100W light bulb was the heat source for the Easy-Bake Oven. If you’re in an area where you NEED the extra heat — and you have electric heat anyhow — incandescents are fine. But I appreciate not having to run my AC as hard.