Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Will $4.10 per Gallon Be Enough?
Is the $4.10 per gallon price for unleaded gasoline high enough now that we’ll begin to push our government for relief? Will we finally begin to cringe enough each time we fill our gas tanks to be reminded that we have the ability to produce crude oil that could be refined into gasoline?
Our President told us that he wanted higher gas prices because that would stimulate us to buy electric vehicles and ‘green’ alternative fuels. He has kept one promise, at least. Our gas prices have now eclipsed the previous high as best I can remember. I think our prices reached the $4.00 mark a year or so ago.
We can now drop $82.00 for twenty gallons of unleaded regular gasoline. If we drive a vehicle with a larger tank, we could spend $102 for twenty-five gallons.
Beyond the price at the pump, we see our food prices rising in the form of both higher prices and smaller package sizes. Certainly some of that increase is due to the ethanol boondoggle and our forced subsidization of every gallon of that stuff produced from corn.
The Middle Eastern countries continue to have high levels of unrest and that helps destabilize the world’s petroleum markets even as the world demands more and more petroleum. The government tells us it is easing the process of permitting more drilling … but there hasn’t been any visible sign of more drilling; only lip service.
Alternatives are fine but not at the expense of our country’s economy when there are sufficient amounts of crude available to us domestically. Alaska could produce more. We could follow Canada’s example and produce oil from the oil sands and shale deposits we have.
‘Green’ energy may be the future, but we really need to be cognizant of our present needs and that seems to be receiving scant attention from this Administration. The economy is precarious enough without our government introducing factors that it has manufactured from whole cloth.
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