$5.60 to $15.14 -- per GALLON!!!That's no joke.
:wow:
$5.60 to $15.14 -- per GALLON!!!Say it with me again...
$5.60 to $15.14 -- per GALLON!!!:wow:
This is actually the range where we should be now. But we are being "shielded" from reality by the powers that be who have an interest in keeping this whole oil-powered economic machine going. If we actually had to pay $10 to $15 dollars per gallon of gas tomorrow (roughly what I pay now to fill up my tank every week) the economy would immediately come crashing down, and we'd see the start of a Second Great Depression.
The good news? Goodbye Hummers, SUVs and other wasteful guzzlers of Oil. Development of mass-transit systems (e.g. train, bus), alternative energy vehicles and power sources would explode.
Read more about it below. These days are very likely just around the corner.
--
Energy Supply and Pricing for a Sustainable Future
---snip---
...The Canadian – and US – governments have generally responded to this instability with interventions designed to restore stable low prices for conventional fossil fuels. Even while ratifying the Kyoto accord (which is designed to reduce CO2 emissions), Ottawa is doing everything it can, including ruling out a carbon tax, and exempting the auto industry, to ensure that the oil and gas and automotive industries are minimally affected. While this may be good short-term politics it is bad economics and lousy environmental policy. And it won’t prevent even steeper price increases in the near future. To avoid a serious energy crisis in coming decades, citizens in the industrial countries should actually be urging their governments to come to international agreement on a persistent, orderly, predictable, and steepening series of oil and natural gas price hikes over the next two decades. The present world energy market obscures the true price of hydrocarbon fuels and inhibits the development of alternatives.
This argument comes in two parts. The first is neatly summarized in a 1998 report by the Washington-based International Centre for Technology Assessment on “The Real Price of Gas”. The purpose of this report was to quantify the numerous external costs associated with the use of fossil-fuelled motor vehicles that are not reflected in US consumer prices. Such hidden costs range from various tax and direct subsidies to the oil industry from governments, through publicly funded infrastructure costs, to the health and environmental costs associated with burning fossil fuels (e.g., breathing ‘second-hand exhaust’). These direct and indirect subsidies seriously distort energy markets, burden the economy with rampant inefficiencies, and in the process, are helping to destabilize the world’s climate.
Depending on the range of subsidies included and the quality of available data, the total unaccounted cost of fossil fuel use in the US was found to lie between $559 billion and $1.7 trillion dollars annually. A fuller social cost accounting for the use of fossil fuel would therefore result in a gasoline price per gallon of between US$ 5.60 and US$ 15.14. In Canadian terms, this would be roughly equivalent to a price per litre of between C$2.20 and C$5.95, or three to eight or nine times recent Vancouver prices (i.e., before the current price surge related to reduced exports from Venezuela and the threat of war in Iraq). In other words, even with the burden of existing taxes, prevailing energy prices do not ‘tell the truth’ about the costs of using fossil energy – North Americans pay a fraction of the price they would pay for gas in a perfectly functioning market.
In fact, US consumers enjoy the most under-priced fuel available in any major industrialized country and Canadians are really not that far behind—with predictable results. As every economist knows, the invariable consequence of under-pricing is overuse. Wealthy and middle-class North Americans live in ever-larger energy-inefficient houses, drive ever-bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles and are therefore squandering in a few decades a non-renewable resource that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. Even if there were no other issues at hand, it would be economically rational and ecologically beneficial—e.g., price-induced lower consumption would help Canada meet its Kyoto commitment—for our federal governments to intervene in today’s energy market to correct at least the best-documented and non-controversial market imperfections. We should be paying significantly greater taxes and prices at the pump.
www.energybulletin.net/3372.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
