Second Wind...

It's verrry late, I'm exhausted...yet I checked a certain site which shall go unnamed and reacted to something posted there...it occurred to me that I should put my comments here instead. That other site gets very little traffic anyway and I'd rather invest in this place.

So, enough already with this self conscious preface...

On The Subject of Rising Gas Prices...

Note how the spread between the "cheaper" gas and the "expensive" gas becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total.

Obvious, eh? Yet that also means that the incentive to "shop" for gas is a bit lessened...which, perversely, dis-incentivises the discounters. It's amazing what you can get "used to".

No doubt the price will continue to escalate (two steps forward one step back) since now the speculators will greedily test to see "what the market will bear".

How can there really be "competition" for a finite commodity like petroleum?

In a sane world we would be doing all we could to free ourselves from the use of fossil fuels all together. The tech is, pretty much, already out there (and will only get better and better with time, all that is lacking is the political, economic and cultural will!

In a sane world we would have been paying five bucks a gallon for the last ten years...and all the "surplus" would have gone into subsidizing businesses and technologies that can free us from fossil fuels in the long run (say fifty years or so).

Unless some creative and gutsy political leadership emerges; it's going to be the same old bs ad infinitum...or at least until catastrophe interrupts our collective delusional passivity.....at that point perhaps even the big "winners" may not want to live in the miserable world created by their short sighted ruthless greed.