5 posts tagged “politics”
I've been forwarded the following chain letter a few times recently (stripped of names & cleaned up the formatting for presentation, but otherwise intact as forwarded):
Normally I don't do this but at $4.00 a gallon maybe it will help ...
Subject: Tips on pumping gas
I don't know what you guys are paying for gasoline ... but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $5.00 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money's worth for every gallon..
Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose, CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.
Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening ... your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role. A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.
When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money.
One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.
Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up. Most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.
WHERE TO BUY USA GAS ...
Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us!
The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor. An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.
Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.
Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.
These companies import Middle Eastern oil:
Shell 205,742,000 barrels Chevron/Texaco 144,332,000 barrels Exxon/Mobil 130,082,000 barrels Marathon/Speedway 117,740,000 barrels Amoco 62,231,000 barrels
Citgo gas is from South America, from a Dictator who hates Americans. If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now over $120 a barrel)
Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:
Sunoco 0 barrels Conoco 0 barrels Sinclair 0 barrels BP/Phillips 0 barrels Hess 0 barrels ARC0 0 barrels
All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing.
But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do. Now don't wimp out at this point ... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!
I'm sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers !!!!!!! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!
If it goes one level further, you guessed it ... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!
All you have to do is send this to 10 people.
It's interesting, but I can't decide if it's hokum. There's enough jargon, detail, and calls to authority here to make it convincing -- "specific gravity", "internal floating roof", "All of this information is available from the Department of Energy", etc -- but not quite enough to convince me.
The Conoco bit, for example -- didn't they have some kind of deal with Iran? I guess not -- back in 1995 they considered it, but were blocked by Clinton, though apparently the company and the country have a long, sordid history together.
The logic seems a little shaky to me though, and the woolly thinking (sloppy punctuation, incongruously jumping from a swipe at Citgo / Hugo Chavez / Venezuela to out-of-nowhere math about aggregate import costs) has me thinking that this person may have a point, but not the whole picture. Can individual gas pumping tactics help you get more per tank? Maybe. Can collective purchasing decision & boycotts make a difference, even on a large scale? I tend to doubt it, but maybe. Do boycotts ever work? Sometimes they do (South Africa & apartheid being the best example I can think of), but often they don't (the sanctions / boycott of Cuba, Iran, & North Korea being examples of them not getting results even after decades of trying at a national scale).
Anyone with more economics tuits have a handle on whether this could work?
So this comes a day or two late to be salient, but then again, it's a lot later than that. Oh well.
A lot of the things I've written about on here are simply facets of big trends driving the world today. You could punt and say that the big trends are just "global warming", or "peak oil", or "peak food", or "the credit crunch", but even those seem like facets of the broader globalization trends going on. If it were just the USA putting out greenhouse gases, consuming oil & other resources, and driving the credit markets, then the problems we're having now might (maybe) still be happening, but less acute. But the big national economies are all interdependent now, and depend crucially of the rapid growth of big new economies like China, India, Brazil, and others.
On one level, the growth of these emerging nations is unquestionably a good thing. It raises the standard of living in the growing countries, provides cheap goods & services to the developed nations, and opens up new markets on both sides. But it raises problems as well: as the standard of living in the emerging countries comes up, so does their level of consumption, increasing the strain on global resources and amplifying trends like climate change and habitat destruction, raising questions about whether this is all sustainable into the future, or whether it brings back a Malthusian crisis.
Thomas Malthus realized in 1798 (!!!) that human populations rise geometrically ("fast"), while natural resources rise linearly ("slow"), and eventually we're likely to hit a point where there aren't enough resources to feed everyone any more. The only problem is, Malthus ended up being wrong: the population has ballooned massively since 1798, and so has the global standard of living by almost any measure. The reason is often believed to be the Industrial Revolution., which brought about a wave of prosperity & growth that swept the world and is still improving lives today. While the pressures Malthus raised over 200 years ago are still present, many feel we can continue to stay ahead of them, while others point out that Malthus was right for all of human history up to his own time, and for all we know we won't be able to escape the trap he identified forever.
Enter Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, who has coined the term "the rise of the rest" to describe where we stand now:
- Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, "The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest", by Fareed Zakaria"
- Newsweek, May 12 2008 issue, excerpt from Zakaria's "The Post-American World"
- NPR/PRI's Marketplace, May 12 2008 broadcast, interview with Zakaria, "Economic problem: 'The rise of the rest'"
- Bostonist blog, May 9 2008, article on a talk Zakaria gave about the book at Harvard
The main differences between what Zakaria is arguing and the themes I've been looking at include:
- Zakaria is the editor for Newsweek, and I'm just some guy, so people will actually listen to him.
- Zakaria has been watching these trends a lot longer, and thinking about them a lot more deeply, than I have, so people will actually pay attention to him.
- Zakaria seems to be a lot more optimistic about the long term outcomes than I currently feel, so maybe people will prefer his take on the situation to my bleaker one.
I'll finish with an excerpt from Zakaria's "Marketplace" piece:
Expensive oil is one facet of the signature trend of our age -- global growth. Last year 124 countries around the world grew at over 4 percent. This year, despite the American slowdown, growth in most of those countries remains robust. While we debate the current financial panic and impending recession, our future is not likely to be shaped by crisis and collapse. The real problems we will face will be the consequence of what I call the "rise of the rest" -- the rest of the world that is.
Look around, it's not just oil that is soaring. Almost every commodity is at a 200-year high. Wheat and rice prices have doubled and then kept on rising over the last two years. In some cases, demand is so high that we're actually running out of stuff. Helium, the gas used in balloons and MRI machines is in short supply globally. And it is the second-most abundant element in the universe.
The problems of growth are, of course, high quality problems. But on this scale they are problems we have never really experienced before. We know how to handle a recession. But how do we handle the rise of the rest? That will be the real challenge of the next decade, long after this recession has turned to recovery.
As Paul Mison notes, the gas price surge is finally driving Americans to use more public transit, but not exactly at a breathtaking rate:
But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.
Sure, usage is higher in Europe, but people always attribute that to higher population density. But does that explain it away?
[...]
Anyway, Canada has lots of open space, too — and it doesn’t even have $8 a gallon gas. Yet it still has usable public transit in a lot more cities than we do.
Fortunately, we'll have Chrysler pulling up the rear on this one:Canadian gasoline is somewhat more expensive than in the US — but not European-level expensive. Otherwise, Canada looks a lot like America, and Toronto almost speaks the same language, eh? Yet a high-quality transit system and different land-use planning make a big difference.
What’s more, as far as I can make out from the data, a lot more Canadians than Americans (as a percentage of the population) have switched to public transit over the past year; because the system is there, they have more flexibility.
All in all, this comparison is a reason not to believe apocalyptic warnings about the long-run effects of energy scarcity: there’s a lot of substitution possible. America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.
But even the Wall Street Journal doesn't think it's a good deal. They go on to say:As an alternative to the standard incentives, the company is offering $2.99 gasoline for the next three years to those buying selected new models. And you can get the cheap gas at almost any station, as it is subsidized through your credit card.
Well, actually I do think prices are going to rocket, but nevermind, they anticipate my objections:The bottom line? In most cases consumers are probably going to be better off taking the standard rebate than going for the subsidized gas. The savings on Let's Refuel America really only start to stack up if you think gasoline prices are going to rocket a lot higher in the years ahead.
Exactly. But, err....And if you think that's going to happen, what are you doing blowing, say, $29,000 on a brand new SUV that gets 15 miles to the gallon? You'd be better off scaling back to a secondhand Civic and ploughing your savings into a good energy fund.
...it's $3.69 at the cheap places down the street from my house, and pushing $3.85 elsewhere. I recently had what I expect to be my last sub-$50 full tank fillup, and can remember not so long ago when I could fill up my first car for under $10.The gas price would have to average more than $4.10 a gallon over the next three years before it made sense to take the subsidized gasoline.
I fully expect gas prices to hover in the low $4 range by fall, and only go up from there. Apparently, or so the article says, the gasoline futures market disagrees with me, but we'll see, won't we?
(On the flip side, when I first read about this program, I was worried that it was just going to stimulate consumption and exacerbate the problem, but apparently they cap how much fuel you can buy based on the projected mileage of the model you purchases, so that's less bad than I thought. Not great, but less bad.)
Next up, thoughts on Fareed Zakaia's the rise of the rest, but I'll save that for tomorrow, as it's now time to go play Boom Blox on the Wii. Yay escapism...
This post is very annoying to me. You must not know any poor people. We use our car for our work, buying and selling antiques, and gas is a HUGE expense for us. I agree that it has to go up so that alternatives are more viable, but the transition is extremely painful for us. We don’t visit friends, much less health clubs! Cable TV? Forget about it! Eating out? More like a big pot of soup that lasts 3 or 4 days. Where we live people drive 30 to 50 miles a day one way to work if they want to make more than 8 bucks an hour.
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she will remain in the presidential race "until there's a nominee."
