U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 50 Straight Days
wsj.com
wsj.com
Natural gas prices are still going up though...
In practice this means the government paying for gas, as every gas subsidy the world over shows. (Also, since when did milk become a necessity or price controlled?)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42300/15259_ai...
To the degree milk is price regulated in America, it is with respect to a minimum price [1]. We subsidise exports to raise the price of milk.
Gas is competitively extracted and competitively refined. The price is high because crude surged and we don’t have many refiners and nobody in the West wants to invest in production because there is a good chance it will be banned or supertaxed soon. Broadly speaking, any time you think the reason for gasoline’s price movement is conspiracy, apart from OPEC, you’re probably wrong.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42300/15268_ai...
In an ideal scenario, we’d institute a carbon tax and subsidize EVs and clean electrical generation if US politics weren’t broken, but here we are.
The average voter doesn’t understand global oil market economics, geopolitics, refinery capacity, fossil investment divestitures, etc, they just want to drive where they want to go. Don’t want to be beholden to a constrained energy resource? Switch to proven alternatives. It’s not rocket science. Make it cheap to buy EVs and make it more financially painful to by combustion vehicles, even if you’re cutting checks to EV makers out of the Fifth Fleet’s budget.
EVs have a life span of less then 10yrs, they often blow up catastropically, they rely one rare earth minerals to be built and run, they are very hard and expensive to fix, and they are charged via fossil fuels the majority of the time; they are not saving the planet of anything. They are marketing! Green is worth big money.
This is demonstrably false, as the Model S alone was first released in 2012 and still has a KBB value estimate of over $20,000 for a 100k mi very good condition example.
It's 13,476 for everyone. This link breaks it down by age and sex:
I agree EVs can easily last as long as any other car so long as you're willing to do a battery once but KBB value doesn't mean squat other than as a measure of original purchase price vs how hard the owners drove them into the ground. Considering who buys Teslas and how they get treated they had better hold their value or something is seriously wrong.
US politics isn’t “broken” most voters just don’t care enough about climate change to actually do anything more than support mitigation efforts in the abstract as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.
My parents, for example, are core democrat voters: older minorities who vote straight ticket democrat not only in presidential elections, but random local ones. My parents didn’t even vote for Larry Hogan, who won our Biden-leaning county by 38 points.
And they don’t care at all about climate change! They have a car and aren’t going to buy an EV. Their biggest concern right now is inflation and gas prices. (My dad blames Biden for not strong arming Ukraine into quickly capitulating so the Russian gas can keep flowing.) If you polled them they would say that we should do something about climate change, because they know republicans are climate change deniers and don’t want to come across as being Republican, but it’s a purely symbolic belief that doesn’t affect their voting patterns at all.
I still argue politics is broken if people don't care about climate change; that apathy flows to their representatives. C'est la vie, we'll clean it up on the backend with tech and clean energy's version of Moore's Law.
"Politics is broken" is right up there with the. "people are bad at X" family infantile assertions always boil down to the old Principal Skinner "everyone else is wrong and I'm right" argument. Said argument is inherently wrong for issues of social norms or consensus where the "average man" is always tautologically correct.
Repositioning it as an individual problem is a very old PR technique.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/tesla-model-3-costs-considerabl...
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-model-3...
If you don’t want to tax carbon and offset EV prices with the proceeds, yes, people of lesser means will experience economic pain in the near term due to apathetic energy policy since the 70s oil embargo. The price of oil will only go up with capital divestments (including refineries at maximum capacity perpetually) and the price of EVs will continue to decline over time. Nothing will spur increased investment in fossil fuels long term in the current political climate. There is no short term fix. You must lean hard into electrification.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0887
If you think you have a valid counterpoint, feel free to elaborate.
Your own link says: “As shown in the table above, our analysis suggests that President Biden’s historic SPR release, in coordination with IEA partners, lowered the price of gasoline by 17 cents to 42 cents per gallon, with an alternate approach suggesting a point estimate of 38 cents per gallon.”
So, even their most generous estimate doesn’t support what you are saying. And that’s assuming that the price of gas wont drop any further (it will).
In my area we went from 1.80 to a high of 4.60 and are sitting around 4.00 today. The administration doesn’t get credit for a small correction on a massive price spike.
He said "Policy causes increases on the market" meaning that the government can impact prices. Your original post went against that idea, or at least attempted to discredit it by reducing the argument down to a stock phrase.
And then he said "The administration doesn’t get credit for a small correction on a massive price spike". I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's a reasonable person. So perhaps he's willing to give a letter of thanks rather than the whole word until prices fall further.
At this point it's like thanking someone for a bandaid after they've cut your finger off.