Gas prices 2019 and beyond

Matts said:
Supply and demand. Few theories are more accurate than the effect of supply and demand on prices.

As long as we keep paying for gas, no matter the price and vote down price related legislation, they will keep raising the price. why shouldn't they, until they kill the golden goose.

In the past, efforts at conservation and fuel alternatives forced oil companies to lower the price of gas until those alternatives became uneconomical and were abandoned. But recently politics got involved on the side of the oil companies and against the interests of consumers.

This time, as gas prices rose way out of wack with the price of oil, some of the public attacked anyone advocating for some way to reduce demand or attack the oil companies. The higher the price went, the stronger the anger against those advocating alternatives, and the less and less blame was put on the companies actually raising the prices.

But eventually, they went a little too far, got the golden goose a little sick, and demand has reduced. No problem for them, folks are now used to $4+ per gallon even if oil is "only" $100 a barrel and gas should be in the low $3's.
The only permanent way to keep prices down is with alternatives to oil based fuel to increase the fuel supply, or increased efficiencies and alternatives to reduce demand.

The best way to keep prices high is to fight any effort to move away from reducing the supply of fuel options or increasing efficiencies.

Supply and demand.
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You don't understand how markets work either.

It isn't the effort to develop alternatives that received pushback. It was the use of force. Under the guise of "we must act now or we're all going to die." they shut down the development of new fossil fuel resources (because evil) and mandated the use of expensive, ineffective and unreliable "green" alternatives. All done without an inkling of understanding of engineering, power generation, infrastructure, markets or the impact it would have on the population.

As is typical of politicians they changed the rules with no regard for anything except something they could campaign on. What do they care of the cost? They're not paying it. They're just stroking a pen. And the public.

If you want energy prices to come down you have to unleash the free market on it. If public investment is made it needs to be done with an eye to ROI instead of what they lobbyists are pushing for. Solyndra anyone? If you want people to choose electric cars, they should be focusing on making electricity cheaper, not making petro fuels more expensive to compete with the inefficient green power. Start building nuclear plants. A cost-effective way to make electricity with no greenhouse emissions that would reduce demand on fossil fuels and help free up supply. But Noooo! Nuclear is evil!

Let's face it, for the greenies, everything is evil. They don't like nuclear. They don't like hydro. They don't like coal. They don't like oil. They don't like gas. They're not fond of the bird-smoker solar installations. They have issues with bird-killer windmills. Nothing that works in reality pleases these people, so I'd suggest we stop listening to their rainbow and unicorn fart fantasies and start looking at practical solutions to these problems. Why isn't there more development of bio-fuels like blue-green algae? We could power most things diesel, or at least the significant amount of it with a carbon-neutral fuel and not have to do a massive overhaul of infrastructure. That would free up a tremendous amount of petroleum which would reduce our use of it. Instead, clueless people are clinging to the fantasy that electricity falls from the sky and is spotlessly clean and imagining that everybody is just going to buy an electric car in five years and plug it into an electrical grid that's already at it's limits. No big corporate lobby for the algae like there is for corn, I guess.

You're certainly right about big oil and lobbying, but you missed the corporations that are cashing in on windmills, ethanol, solar and electric vehicles. You're wrong about the golden goose too. The government is killing it, not the oil companies. They're just trying to wring out what's left before all of their investment turns into junk. You're also wrong about the notion that the left was trying to "develop alternatives" as if it was a benign thing. It's not. It may be well intentioned for the concerned who aren't looking to cash in, but it's failing horribly in the execution because the people executing it think electricity comes from the socket on the wall. I don't expect it to get any better until there's a significant change in the people running the show.

And BTW, if it's all just greed, why does the price of gas ever drop? Why doesn't it keep going up just because it can?
 
"And BTW, if it's all just greed, why does the price of gas ever drop? Why doesn't it keep going up just because it can?"

Why do I think prices ever come down? Why does anyone ever lower prices, to make more money in the long run. That's capitalism.
The price comes down when people begin driving less, future orders are down, interest in alternatives is increasing, government pressure risks losing sweetheart lease deals and armed protection, it costs too much to maintain a high inventory.

Why do you think gas prices ever go down if not to make more money?
 
Matts said:
"And BTW, if it's all just greed, why does the price of gas ever drop? Why doesn't it keep going up just because it can?"

Why do I think prices ever come down? Why does anyone ever lower prices, to make more money in the long run. That's capitalism.
The price comes down when people begin driving less, future orders are down, interest in alternatives is increasing, government pressure risks losing sweetheart lease deals and armed protection, it costs too much to maintain a high inventory.

Why do you think gas prices ever go down if not to make more money?
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So, you're saying free market capitalism works. Lower costs and higher supply will drive prices down because of competition. Sounds good.

Why don't we apply that to electric cars and let consumers make the choice instead of telling everybody in 2035 or whatever year you won't have a choice anymore?
 
Talking about supply and demand. Stores can't give away purell hand sanitizer! Bought 2-16oz bottles for $3.96 yesterday. At the height of the pandemic, the same bottles were sold on Amazon for $50 and up.
 
OVERBORED said:
Talking about supply and demand. Stores can't give away purell hand sanitizer! Bought 2-16oz bottles for $3.96 yesterday. At the height of the pandemic, the same bottles were sold on Amazon for $50 and up.
Click to expand...

nypost.com

NY drowning in 700,000 gallons of hand sanitizer it can’t get rid of

The push by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to create hand sanitizer during the pandemic has left the state with a glut of the product it can no longer use. The state has been forced to shelve 700,000 gal…
nypost.com nypost.com
 
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Avenger said:
So, you're saying free market capitalism works. Lower costs and higher supply will drive prices down because of competition. Sounds good.

Why don't we apply that to electric cars and let consumers make the choice instead of telling everybody in 2035 or whatever year you won't have a choice anymore?
Click to expand...
I still have not heard your plan to lower gas prices long term.
more oil supply did not work. Oil prices and gas prices went out of sinc. Just because we practically give away our nation's oil to oil companies, doesn't force them to refine it into fuel. The only effective thing that brings down gas prices is increased efforts at conservation or everyone deciding to stay home.

Now, electric cars. The point of these was not merely to lower gas prices. We only get one planet. converting something other than fossil fuels into electricity and powering our cars with that may be our only hope.

Also, almost no industry receives more direct and indirect government welfare than the oil industry.
 
Found this pic on my hard drive from 9/2/05 - I think it was one of the first posts from the old NE Gas Prices 2005 thread that got deleted at some point there and restored? It's that Bedford station off I-684 that I posted a news article about a few pages ago. If I recall it was like 80¢ more than anywhere else.


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