I drove by a gas station yesterday. The price of diesel at their pumps was $4.159/gallon. That is up thirty cents in less than a month.
Just about everything, other than cars and small trucks, runs on diesel fuel. Everything gets delivered by trucks or trains which burn diesel fuel. Jet-A fuel is not much different from diesel. No. 2 heating oil is basically diesel fuel without road taxes. Farm machinery runs on diesel. As it becomes more and more expensive to transport things, the costs of transporting everything goes up.
That's one point.
Then add to that the push to make ethanol fuel and biodiesel. Right now, most of that is coming from corn, some from soybeans. That pushes the price of those crops up. Cattle consume a lot of corn, so the price of beef and dairy products have to go up. Farmers also convert their production to grow corn for ethanol, which means they stop growing crops such as wheat, which means the price of flour goes up.
The rise in the cost of oil also means that the cost of plastic goes up and, as the plastics industry just loves to tell you, plastics are in almost every thing you use. The rise in the cost of energy means the cost of aluminum goes up; what isn't made of plastic is made of aluminum. Steel is mostly imported these days, which means that steel comes from overseas on ships that burn (can you say it all together, class) oil.
So there you are. The price of everything you wear, use or eat is climbing. At the same time, the value of homes are falling and, as banks foreclose on them, nobody is buying at foreclosure sales. The banks then have to dump them at fire-sale prices, which pushes down the local markets for the rest of the sellers. The cost of living in some of those homes, especially those out in "exurbia", shoots up at the same time the value of those homes are plummeting.
I'm not saying the sky is necessarily falling. But a whole lot of economic chickens are coming home to roost at the same time and the only response out of the White House is "here's a tax rebate and we can fix this by making tax cuts for the rich permanent, oh, and boo! The terrorists are coming to kill you because Congress won't let the telecom companies off the hook for breaking the law."
We are so screwed.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
4 comments:
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Holy shit, four fifteen a gallon?!!Last I looked thats a whole dollar more per gallon there than it is here!
ReplyDeleteThat will put some truckers out of business.The average big rig has at the minimum a hundred gallon tank and cross country rigs have TWO, one hundred and fifty gallon tanks.
Nope, I was wrong, it has gone way the hell up out here too but not as bad, I saw $3.79 a gallon at one of the out of the way places on my way in this morning.
ReplyDeleteThink Progress says it will be four dollar a gallon gas this spring, that will push diesel even higher yet.
We are screwed.
Diesel is high here, admittedly. Regular gas is $3.299/gal. But even in the next state, diesel is close to $3.70/gal.
ReplyDeleteA smart trucker is surfing the Internet for prices.
At the high cost station, all I see using the diesel pumps are companies that have flowage contracts with them (they almost certainly get a price break) and private individuals. I don't see any other commercial users at those pumps.
Believe me, the smart trucker knows where all the cheap diesel is on his routes and has no (zero) need for the Internet to know this. Hell, I know where all the cheap *gasoline* is on long-distance routes that I drive regularly, and I ain't looking at a profit-loss statement when doing so (my long distance trips are all loss, except insofar as my mental sanity is concerned).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Long Distance Penguin