Thursday, September 01, 2005
options for dealing with high fuel prices.
go to gasbuddy.com for lists of locations and prices as submitted by motorists. this is a portal page that links to state and then city or regional sites. they are getting pretty heavily loaded right now, so if you get a "server busy" message, just keep trying.
there are also credit cards out there that offer discounts on gas purchases, but the terms are drying up quick. it appears at least one card changed their discount from 10% to 5%. even 5% helps at $3 / gallon.
zoom [cough, cough]
and, this may seem silly, but the price of premium is lower than ever, since it has kept a pretty constant price difference of 20 cents over the years. at $1.50 /gallon, that's 13%, at $3 /gallon, it's 7%. of course, it's still 20 cents out of a shrinking budget (and maybe that is the proper base for the marginal value of those two dimes).
car pooling ? maybe. biking ? i think i can effectively use a bike for all those small trips for odds & ends. i realize this option is not possible for many nowadays. looks like i'm going to get exercise in spite of my recalcitrant laziness ;-) of course, that still doesn't affect the increase in transportation costs being passed along in prices for other items. but if overall consumption can be reduced, it will have some small impact.
i'm hanging here for labor day. that's only personally immediately helpful. assuming more people come to the same conclusion, it may improve the fuel situation a little, but will negatively affect the rest of the economy incidental to travel. of course, there should be a complementary stay-at-home economy.
update: almost forgot, one of the most effective ways we can reduce fuel consumption is to use telecommuting to its full ('fuel', heh heh) advantage. the corporate cultures and pea-brained managers that prevent this from coming into its own probably need some governmental prompting at this point. it's not like they're averse to the idea in principal - they have no problem outsourcing and offshoring.
the big question is what to do with winter heating costs, and all the rest of the fuel related activities (cooking, water heating, and any electric use - that includes computers).
something _all_ of use should have done long ago - and it may still be worth it - is to invest in hedge funds, commodities futures for oil and gas. although this may already have had a backlash effect that would just be made worse this way: people have been making $$$ on speculation in these markets. that's abuse of financial instruments; someday one would hope there would be laws against what has been increasingly treated as a common gambling pool. yet it still makes sense as a hedge, even if the forces one is hedging against arise purely from speculation.
i'm not at all certain about the financial mechanics of that sort of hedging. it would seem that oil companies and the like could already have availed themselves of this and passed on the benefits. likewise, the government could have done the same. someone explain this to me - ? speculation is already acknowledged to have inflated prices greatly. too many times in the recent past this has hurt the global economy. housing / real estate is probably next. and now i have to stop; this is veering into another type of thread entirely.
thoughts on socio-economic realities brought on by the current energy situation.
...if the problem with fuel right now is in production and delivery, won't that (temporarily) decrease consumption, both at the pump and at refineries, equating to lower demand for crude, which should drive the prices down ? there should be a slight backlog developing in crude supplies right now. releasing national oil reserves is a useless gesture if the refineries can't get to it. something screwy is going on.
bush and his administration doing everything they can? not hardly. what about price freezes ? steps to cut consumption (as in, quotas and the old even-odd fill up days, etc.) ? nah. the only steps he took were to help the oil industry, not the consumer.
just off the top of my head. i know the economics work out more complicated, but temporary relief to ride out the bubble will not affect long term economics. however, voluntary consumption reduction would have a more lasting effect.
not likely to happen. the great american exurb exodus now mandates expensive commutes, in expensive vehicles, to expensive homes. well, i guess we got what we wanted. i don't think the housing and vehicle industry forced this situation on us. we all colluded to create this mess.
but still, the _real_ pain point for fuel costs has yet to be reached for the level of disposable income available. free markets do not distinguish between the haves and have-nots, it operates on the gross average forces of supply & demand, etc. the increasingly highly skewed distribution of wealth means that the lower wealth echelons have less and less relative economic force, meaning that their pain points will have been far exceeded by the time the controlling economic sectors begin to balance out. the reduction in demand, and the relative price benefits gained, will come at the expense of those least able to afford it.
the alternative is something no one would agree to, because it would mean paying at least an amount proportional to income or other indicator of ability to pay. instead, our fuel dependent economy, which is not a luxury that people can opt out of entirely, imposes the equivalent of a hugely regressive tax on the population.
the mcmansion echelon of society will eventually feel real pain too, it's inevitable. their sense of entitlement about their position in the world is as surely an illusion as the daydreams of the poor. they are the even more willing tools of the top of the food chain.
socialism ? no. but surely there is a better balance. both major parties have had about equal parts in creating this situation in their own particular ways. but even libertarianism equates to a type of social darwinism in this situation, an uncontrolled economic eugenics. the green party ? their anti-nuclear lobbying has contributed to this mess as surely as the others.
so where is the solution to be found ? are our imaginations that weak ? apparently. it may be more symptomatic of a diseased social conscience and accountability than anything else. there is great "fun" being had internationally with widespread adoption of captialist machinery and democratic pretenses. but it is no longer a free market if any sense of competition is effectively masked from the consumer when the necessities to life are controlled by groups which are immune to choice.
unrestrained capitalism can only work, it seems, in an infinite marketplace. there was some semblance of that when the world was a bigger place, and later, when other non-capitalist economies acted as economic sink and source to the growing west. but with the world much smaller, and no buffers available, the equations no longer apply. the rational social responsibility of the mid-twentieth century seems far better. but that was illusion as well.
time for a new socio-economic theory, one that won't raise the hackles of establishment institutions over concerns of unfriendly revolutions. besides, the populace is more defanged than ever. what happens to "nature red in tooth and claw" when the great majority have been disarmed in all possible ways ? speciation is what happens. bifurcation into predator and prey.
that sort of observation seems to naturally arise, over and over. but it was clear that some (historical) suggestions as to how to respond to this were at best naive, and at worst genocidal. i don't know that _any_ response to this results in any different conclusion. i think the same gross results occur, they just get shifted around in time and geographically.
the bottom line is that there is a population / resource imbalance. the illusion of "newly created wealth" can only be just that, illusory. there is some cost for all of this. and there are limits to human endeavors, to our science and imagination and our collective willingness to attempt ever larger tasks.
some people talk of singularities, of approaching a point of exponential and ultimately catastrophic change, it's good or bad or neutral, nature indeterminable. well, we have been in a "singularity" for a few centuries now. turns out it's a phase change, like water to ice, or steam. such transitions are characterized by critical points and singularities in various parameters, and chaotic and fractal behavior throughout the system. kind of looks like now. on either side of the transition would be regions of much greater relative stability and homogeneity.
where we're heading i don't know. depending on the nucleation sites and the various temperature and pressures there is a great range of possibilities. so what is a desirable outcome, and what needs to be pushed or pulled to get it there, before the opportunity is lost ? that is, if we aren't seeing the final changes already.
after that, all we can hope for is catastrophe. unless of course you like the world you live in, in which case the word is "fear", not "hope".