US cut its consumption of gas by 50% it would'nt lower gas prices???

[hadrons]

Anyone hear this before??? Someone mentioned it to me, but I wasn't sure if its floating RW talking points or not. The only way I can see that in the title being true is whatever demand of oil the U.S. doesn't purchase will be brought by China, India, etc.

[Taverner]

1. Not really - it would be the opposite really

Big Oil would have record losses, and charge more to make up the difference the next quarter

[End Of The Road]

2. I don't believe it would lower prices, no. But...

who knows? Who is telling the truth about WHY prices are high? I've heard about a brazillian different reasons... have no clue which ONE is true.

That said, my opinion is that gas prices are artificially determined and have little to do with normal market forces.

[Zynx]

7. Fair enough. Without manipulation, they would plunge extremely sharply.

[Deja Q]

11. All the more reason to infer it's all about speculation and manipulation.

Memorial day and immediately afterward clinched it for most people.

[MercutioATC]

3. ...and how do we lower gas consumption by 50%?

Seriously...even if we doubled the mileage standards effective immediately, it takes at least 3-4 years to bring a new car model to the market and there are still tens of millions of older vehicles still on the road.

[Hannah Bell]

4. The US uses 24% of world production according to BP, so that

would be a 12% drop in world consumption. According to the laws of supply/demand, excess supply supposedly drops prices, all else being equal.

[Zynx]

6. Also, inelastic demand curves cut both ways. If demand plunges, prices do too.

In fact, they plunge by a far steeper amount than the reduction in demand.

[Deja Q]

12. Not really.

Go out and buy RAM for a 5 year old PC. There's a glut of unused, new parts. But they sell for twice as much newer RAM because there's "no demand". That's what the local stores say, but online it can be had for far, far, far less...

"Supply and demand" just starts to ring hollow as it seems to work both ways.

[Zynx]

5. Umm....That's total B.S.

We consume 1 out of 4 barrels produced. If we stopped consuming 10 million barrels of oil, there is not any demand out there that could possibly arise in the short term to make up for that.

[hadrons]

8. That's what I was thinking ....

I wasn't sure

[YellowRubberDuckie]

9. No.

The reason is, all the inflated gas prices are caused by the speculators. It has nothing to do with supply and demand anymore.
Duckie

[soothsayer]

10. and the falling dollar

[Deja Q]

13. Which isn't helped by offshoring, not controlling trade (true fair trade), et cetera.

[ThoughtCriminal]

15. Speculator ARE influenced by demand

If they see a 50% reduction coming, their enthusiasm for that commodity is going to diminish considerably. They're going to look elsewhere.

[NorthCarolina]

14. It probably wouldn't, being that prices are artificially inflated and all anyway.

eom

[ThePowerofWill]

16. Yeah it would be like water conservation in my state.

Everyone was begged to conserve last year, and in the future because of drought. Guess what? The public responded and water use fell about 25-30%.

Well this caused a short fall in many city budgets, so what did they do? Charge you 30% more for your water of course.

[BigDaddy44]

17. Of course it would

Inventory would be sky high. Unsold inventory is of no good to anyone. And gasoline has a shelf life -- it doesn't stay good forever. Therefore, you have to get rid of it. You either dump it in the ocean (and make zero $ on it), or you lower the price to move inventory.