Russell Chapman wrote:
> Could someone help me with this?
> I've been skimming the "environment vs energy" thread - many
> statisitics and many
> opinions as to what constitutes wilderness etc etc, but the
> underlying theme seems
> to be that the US suddenly needs more energy than it has
> available right now
>snip<
> It seems like I've missed some background here - can anyone
> explain how this seems
> to have happenned in the last 6 months?
You might be surprised, most Americans are asking the same questions!
>From what I am reading and hearing on the news - which is only what they
want us to know - that the west coast electricity crisis is a result of
federal deregulation and bad management of the electric companies coupled
with the fact that several major (regional) nuclear reactors are offline at
the moment for maintenance.
An interesting bit of trivia, last month, a major California electric
company declared bankruptcy, literally HOURS after depositing $50 million
dollars in bonus checks into mid and upper management bank accounts. The
public and even the governor screamed and the politicians promised
investigations. However, as with many stories, the results of those
investigations (if they happened at all) seem to have lost their
newsworthiness.
story here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/cal_power010409.html
The outrageous gas prices are supposedly a result of federally mandated
reformulation to reduce emissions. The news keeps telling us that the
increasing prices have nothing to do with the price per barrel from the
producers or the amount of actual output because both have stayed fairly
consistent.
A few personal observations -
1. Consistently, gas prices go up $0.20 to $0.30 per gallon right before the
weekend, usually on Thursday. Then they slowly fall by a few cents a day
until the next weekend. This trend skipped a weekend right before Memorial
Day, but on the Thursday evening before Memorial Day weekend, the prices
went up here locally from $1.53 to $1.89 a gallon, and now the weekend is
over, they have fallen to about $1.69 a gallon.
2. Gas prices at the same franchises within 5 miles of each other can vary
by as much as $0.35 per gallon. If they are the same franchise (BP,
Marathon, Speedway) then I bet that they are getting gas from the same
supply truck. I could understand an independent station charging a higher
price (due to lack of bulk purchasing) but the same franchise stations
within a few miles of each other?
Gary
_____________________________________________
Gary L. Nunn
Delaware Ohio
By the time they had diminished from 50
to eight, the other dwarves began to
suspect "Hungry."
