[quote]Tithonus81 wrote:
tGunslinger wrote:
As long as price raises do nothing but make 99% of Americans shake their head, curse the pump, and fill their gas tanks, the Oil Corps, from an economic standpoint, ought to raise their prices. Price raises so far have done virtually nothing to decrease volume sold. It doesn’t take Alan Greenspan to see that Oil Corps could easily justify raising prices.
Nailed it on the head. Most people are still living under the mindset that we’re not running out of oil and refinery production. They will bitch and complain about and oil and gas prices, but not do a whole lot more than that.
Sales of SUVs may be down, but they’re not down that much. Sales of large trucks are actually up and they get just as bad gas mileage as the SUVs.
Have you seen the ridiculous sales figures for the new Toyota Tundra? It gets a whooping 15 mpg/city 18mpg/hwy. We still think of our automobiles as status symbols and not point A to point B reliable transportation.
I think they could easily take gas prices to $5-$6 (which they will) and it really wouldn’t significantly affect most people’s driving habits or automotive purchases. What it will do though is chew up people’s disposable income, which will cause future problems down the road. But Americans have never been all that good at planning a sustainable future for themselves. Politically, economically, financially or otherwise.[/quote]
Good post.
Americans are complacent and out of touch on the issue of oil.
The benefits of reducing our dependency on foreign oil are many yet the issue is largely ignored. We continue to flaunt our wealth by buying inefficient transportation and housing and creating suburban sprawl that is ever increasing the average workers commute.
All the while personal and government debt continues to grow.
Our immensely expensive military is also stretched thin trying to secure democracy in the only region that could possibly meet world demand for oil in the not so distant future. A region also filled with terrorists that have promised to attack oil production. A region that will also require trillions of dollars of investment to meet growing world demand.
Yet we continue to behave as a nation as if cheap and abundant foreign oil is something you can count on.