$4.67 A Gallon

[wmthor]

The local grocery offers a $.10 a gallon discount on their fuel whenever you buy $50.00 or more in groceries. I've gotten into the habit of buying the groceries and then topping off the tank as I leave. Yesterday I bought $67 dollars on groceries and then pumped 22 gallons of premium into the truck @ $3.579 a gallon.

[shamustwin]

[quote="rickenbrother"]Jerry, you and I must be among the slowest SoCal drivers on an open freeway, trying to get the best gas mileage. I really try hard to keep my speed under 70 mph, but the flow of traffic is 80 mph or better. Even if I am doing 75 mph, every car here whizzes by me like I'm standing still. quote]

Yeah, you'd notice me on the 405 every morning. I stay out of everyone's way, pretty much. I am noticing more and more people keeping pace with me. It does help. It's hard to adjust to driving that way, the temptation is there to speed up to block some jerk.

But I also see others around me trying so frantically to get where they're going, they begin to look ridiculous.
And the (d)anger in people!

Ah well, to each his own. I did read GM is laying off as a result of gas prices/SUV and some lower milage cars not selling well. I feel bad for those folks.

[dean712]

An eco-tip on saving money on gas (recently received from the Sierra Club):

The friendly folks over at the San Francisco Chronicle did some reseach and concluded that "how much you stand to save depends on a lot of factors. With gas at $4 a gallon, a driver with a long commute - 400 miles a week - and a gas-guzzling vehicle getting only 20 mpg would save $18.74 a week by slowing down dramatically from 75 to 55 mph, extrapolating from the government's most recent figures on the subject. Even a more moderate deceleration - from 70 to 60 mph - would save that driver $11.74 a week."

- - - - - -

When our old Dodge finally bit the dust for good last year, we did some shopping around for a gas-saving car. Since my wife has a large sedan and does almost all of the kid-hauling, I looked for a gas-sipper that I could use to commute. I found a Toyota Yaris hatchback, which I'm really happy with. It's a simple, budget car that gets 28mpg city and 35mpg hwy (my figures over the last year). There are other similar models from other manufacturers - Chevy Aveo, Honda Fit, etc. Works great for me, and with gas at $3 to $4 a gallon, the car will literally pay for itself over its lifetime, compared to the old Dodge.

[qwezirider]

I did read GM is laying off as a result of gas prices/SUV and some lower milage cars not selling well. I feel bad for those folks.

My dad retired from them just last summer after 42 years. The last 13 or so years spent in two different truck plants of theirs. Good timing on his part. Just two years ago I remember him commenting they wouldn't allow him to take one of the early retirement packages because they couldn't build enough of the darn things. I also used to work for a contractor to GM that hauled finished Saturns. There were some tough times for us trying to get cars moved because GM plants were always competing with each other on which got the most attention from us moving product...and the high profit trucks and SUVs always got preference.

Changing times, indeed.

[paologregorio]

The low dollar is definitely hurting us price-wise here, but there are plenty of other factors. We're going to have to start drilling here if we want any thing to change.

For starters, once again:
Out of each gallon of gas, the federal and state governments, who do nothing to produce the oil, and do much to prevent oil companies from producing and refining it get the following from each gallon of gas:
Federal: 18.4 cents per gallon
State (California)17 cents per gallon
*the state also gets sales tax on each dollar of gasoline sold in addition to the gas tax.
Much is made about record oil company profits, but oil companies, who do all the producing, get vilified, dragged before congress, and get accused of all of the cloak and dagger stuff, get the following profit for each gallon of gasoline sold:

8.5 cents.

There's a proposal to temporarily eliminate the federal gasoline tax during summer, but NY Senator Charles Schumer, when asked about it, said that the oil companies should pay for the tax holiday, which would mean that the oil companies would be operating at a 10 cent per gallon loss for each gallon sold. In a nutshell, he's telling us that the government can never make do with less, even though the rest of us effectively have to do so by paying all of the increases in fuel and food prices. Nice, eh? But he's looking out for us, right? Yeah right.


Fuel prices aren't going to come down until we start drilling for oil and building refineries here. We can conserve all we want to, and I'm all for it, but unless our populations start shrinking, and China and India stop developing and start shrinking as well, demand for fuel is going to increase, and alternative fuels are not going to be able to supply anything near what's required at market prices for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, we have to use oil; it's the lifeblood of the economy, no matter who's president. There’s more oil on this planet than we ever thought. Oil's being found in places that we never thought it could exist. Brazil has tons of oil and will b e a huge producer in the next two decades. Russia has tons of Caspian oil. China is collaborating with Cuba to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is one of mostly politics, not supply. There are enough people who don't support drilling and producing oil domestically, or using nuclear power to generate the power grid, even though no one in the U.S. has ever been injured by nuclear power, even at Three Mile Island, so that the price of fuel is artificially high. The French use 75% nuclear power, and with little waste, because they recycle their spent fuel rods, something that's been outlawed here in the states because at one time some country was able to get a hold of a spent fuel rod from another country, not us, and use it to build a bomb.

We aren’t' just importing crude oil, we're also importing refined fuel, because we haven't built any refineries here in the U.S. in over twenty five years due to all of the red tape involved. We have tons of oil in the ANWR, in the Dakotas, off all of our coasts, but we don't seem to want to drill for it, even though Cuba and China do. If anyone can drill safely, it's us, rather than developing nations. Here in the states there are wells that were capped off in the 80s when prices too low to pump from them profitably, which would be now, but guess what, the wells haven't been allowed to be reopened. If we had drilled in ANWR ten years ago, when it was first proposed, it would have been pumping oil already. We can avoid pumping our own oil and have high prices, or we can be willing to pump or own oil and have lower prices, but we can't refrain from producing oil and have low prices.

Full disclosure, I do not own any oil company stock, or have any financial interest in the oil business. I don't have an interest in seeing fuel prices, and with them the price of everything else, come down.

I just want to go back to talking about guitars...

[ozover50]

I was thinking of making my own alternate fuel from potatoes but at $2.75 per kilo it would cost me $110.00 per litre!!

I'm not that green!

[wmthor]

There's a car wash owner here in Houston that is exchanging free washes to restaurant owners in exchange for their used cooking oil. He refines the used cooking oil into bio-diesel.

http://www.khou.com/video/?z=y&nvid=237618&shu=1

[johnallg]

It's a $1.29/litre here. Thankfully my wife and I hardly drive at all during the week. Weekends though are another story. Speculators, the oil companies and government are doing a good job of conditioning the media to have us brace for the worst. They want us to get used to the high prices, since they are not going away any time soon or perhaps ever, unfortunately.

Being in the media, I think you have it backwards. The evening news story predicts prices are going up, the local stations see the report, and dang if the next day prices go up. I point this out to them, that they are helping cause the rise in pump prices, and that makes me not very popular and I get cursory comments back.

[johnallg]

Great post, PGA.

[paologregorio]

Great post, PGA.

Thanks.

[jdogric12]

[deaconblues]

My $.02...

If you continue to drive normally and buy inefficient cars or trucks, you are implying consent to higher prices. I think we're seeing the end of an era, and efforts to find new oil seem more and more desperate (shales in Canada, the measly amount in ANWR, bickering over the North Pole)...when the price gets so high that people stop complaining and change their ways, we'll finally be making progress.

[shamustwin]

I believe hemp can be made into fuel...

[leftyguitars]

I believe hemp can be made into fuel...

I can think of better uses for it!

[admin]

Paul: In discussing guitars, we talk about the price of GAS here every day.