It could easily go higher than that; With OPEC setting the floor at $3.50, the speculators could and will drive the price higher than that...I look for the return of $4 gasoline, if not more.

The smart thing to do is to cut back on gasoline driving, ride public transportation when possible, and buy electric drive cars. We can no longer contribute to the wealth and greed of those who intend to harm us.

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Chutzpah! How dare you complain about this?

You loudly, even hysterically, oppose any and all measures to stop that, regardless of how affordable, mild, and urgently necessary for our environment, economy, and national security they are.

Meanwhile due in part to the FUD you and people like you believe and spread to others, we continue the astonishingly stupid and repeatedly catastrophic policy, year after year, of passively letting nearly every new car sold here being unnecerrarily locked in to being able to use ONLY one fuel - the fuel whose price OPEC has permanent and irremovable control over.

Instead we could just (cover your ears for the dreaded M word, Tim) mandate that all new cars sold be fullyflex-fueled, able to run equally easily on gasoline or any alcohol fuel (methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol). This would cost automakers a mere $130 per car and would break OPEC's vertical monopoly, open up the market, and allow us to re-direct our fuel dollars away from our enemies.

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And burn crops instead!

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Ernie, crop-derived alcohol fuel burns far more cleanly than gasoline.

As for the food vs. fuel myth, relax.

Out of 800 million acres of US farmland, only 280 M is cultivated, so there's huge room for expansion for fuel crops. Per acre yields are also constantly rising (up 17% since 2002 alone, and Iowa now grows more corn than the entire 1940s USA). While ethanol corn production has increased several fold, food corn production has also gone up, 34%, as have other staples such as soybeans.

Finally, non "food" biomass such as crop residues, sawdust, rice bran, weed plants, sewage, etc., can be made into methanol fuel.

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Ernie,

Arguing with these eco-Fascists like Carney is like yelling at a piece of dog crap hoping it will turn into a daisy. Good luck with that!

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If your goal is to defeat OPEC by slashing its revenue, reducing fuel use is totally ineffective and therefore pointless and irrelevant.

All OPEC has to do in response to such a worldwide reduction of oil purchases is to slash production to match, thereby spiking prices. It thus gets the same revenue as before - thus caring little how many or how few barrels of oil it has to sell to achieve that.

Therefore all the endless blather and the fortunes of public and private money that is being poured into fuel efficiency, small cars, hybrids, etc., is a colossally stupid, futile, useless waste.

All the more so because none of that would even reduce fuel use anyway (not that reducing fuel use would actually reduce OPEC revenue, see above). That's because the growth in population and wealth creates growth in cars, drivers, miles driven, and fuel demand that FAR outpaces gains in fuel efficiency.

We know this because we've seen it. From 1976 to 1990 average MPGs went from 13 to 20, a huge gain. So did fuel use fall commensurately? No, in fact it ROSE from 89 to 103 billion gallons a year in that same timeframe (half of which was in stagnation or recession, from 76 to 83 - if that had been all growth, there would have been even more dramatic an increase in fuel use).

The real solution, the only solution, is to SWITCH fuels away from petroleum to something not enriching and permanently dominated by OPEC. The most practical and affordable choice for the short to mid term to accomplish that is alcohol fuel, because alcohol compatibility involves only minor changes to cars that cost only $130 per vehicle.

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Serious conservation would kick Opec in the 'nads. OPEC is a shaky cartel. Their members would cheat during any significant cut back.

A 50 mpg Prius is going to save a lot more energy than 16 mpg E85 car and 16mpg is the best combined MPG I have see of any car burning E85.

Conservation can curtail more imports than ethanol without the negative consequences. (food prices, land use, ground water depletion, increased pollution from fertilizer run off etc...).

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Wrong, Snowdog. The Saudis have the whip hand over the rest of the cartel and can and do enforce discipline on the other members who run over quota by flooding the market, crashing the price so that no one other than the Saudis, who have by far the world's lowest exploration and extraction costs, can make money. The others know this and aside from occasional grumbling, jostling, and "testing", by and large accept this discipline because they know it is in their long-term best interests.

And once again, it's not about "saving energy". It's not about conservation. These concepts and goals are not only unattainable on a net basis, but are irrelevant and ineffective even if they were attainable, if you're talking about defeating OPEC.

As for claiming that a renewable fuel based on growing plants and/or recycling trash is worse for the environment than petroleum, it doesn't pass the laugh test.

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Oh, and for the record, Snowdog, about your claims of no FFV exceeding 16 MPG, and not that MPG is at all relevant for reasons I've explained, the first FFV vehicle whose mileage I looked up, the Chevy Impala, is, depending on trim level, 17~19 MPG city, 27~29 highway. (The 16/24 MPG model is gasoline-only).

http://www.chevrolet.com/vehicles/2009/impala/features.do

FFV HHR's have 21~22 city and 29~32 MPG highway.

The Chrysler Sebring Touring convertible (the only FFV level) is 18 city, 26 highway.

Even the Town and Country LX and the Dodge Grand Caravan SE, SE G, and Cargo Vans, all have 17 city, 24 highway (the SXT is gasoline-only). Minivans!

http://tinyurl.com/chhq3f

http://tinyurl.com/mps6e3

So you're wrong. Again.

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Carney. I don't quite understand how you think cutting imports by 15% through serious conservation would be meaningless. But if we somehow did the same with ethanol production it would be our savior. To me that just reinforces that you are some kind of zealot.

And as far as impact. Replacing 15% with conservation means replacing it with no environmental cost because your are replacing with nothing. To do the same with Ethanol, mean increased fertilizer run off into the gulf "dead zone", means increased depletion on strained water tables, means increased C02 for land conversion etc..).

Clearly if you are even half sane you could see it is a much better win if we could cut 15% of petroleum use through conservation, than by causing the above issues to produce E85. Is your real goal decreasing petroleum usage, or increasing Ethanol production?

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"The Saudis (...) can and do enforce discipline on the other members who run over quota by flooding the market, crashing the price so that no one other than the Saudis, (...) can make money."

So... just to clarify: The Saudis have enough excess production capacity to crash the WORLD oil price to below the extraction costs of the other OPEC countries?

Really? I think you'll have to back that one up.

Furthermore, as we've previously discussed (using YOUR reference material), driving an E85 vehicle at 40mpg for a mile requires as much imported fossil fuel as driving a Prius at 50mpg for a mile... and that was using the charitable end of the energy return range found in the literature. Remember that?
www.autobloggreen.com/2009/05/19/i-financial-times-i-gm-doesnt-need-chevy-camaro-success-w/

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Carney quote: "Oh, and for the record, Snowdog, about your claims of no FFV exceeding 16 MPG....
So you're wrong. Again."

What I actually wrote(spelling errors and all).
"16mpg is the best combined MPG I have see of any car burning E85"

Apparently that was clear enough. By any car burning e85, I mean MPG while actually burning E85 wonder fuel, You are showing unadulterated regular gas MPG which has much better MPG for obvious reasons.

If you check fueleconomy.gov, the top E85 MPG is 16MPG combined.

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Actually, the cheapest, most effective way to eliminate your personal dependance on oil is to sell your car and move closer to work.

What you pay by switching to Alcohol:

$130 (plus the cost of a new car, which, I assume you were going to do anyway)

What you gain by getting rid of your car:

$120 a month in insurance premiums.
$450 a month in car payments.
$100 a month in gas.
$100 a year in tuneups.

Notice something about that list? Gas is its next cheapest expense. I don't see you complaining about the other expenses.

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Carney, it seems in your enthusiasm for biofuels, you've inadvertently undercut your own argument. Ad Snowdog pointed out, if reducing fuel use is "totally ineffective", then would't reducing petroleum use via biofuels also be totally ineffective?

While consumption went up from 1976 to 1990, that was IN SPITE OF, not because of increases in average MPG. You see, in that same period, population increased and the number of drivers and vehicles increased by several million. Had it not been for improved fuel economy, the consumption increase would have been even greater.

While I do see a role for biofuels, for older ICE vehicles, hybrids, jet aircraft, etc., biofuel supplies are insufficient on their own to get us off petroleum fuels. But coupled with efficiency improvements and plug-ins, the combination might well do the trick.

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"Carney, it seems in your enthusiasm for biofuels, you've inadvertently undercut your own argument. Ad Snowdog pointed out, if reducing fuel use is "totally ineffective", then would't reducing petroleum use via biofuels also be totally ineffective?"

That's a perfectly legitimate point, Chris M., but in "my" paradigm, we're switching fuels rather than attempting to live under an austerity regime. The former is much easier to accomplish and thus more practical.

Case in point: electricity generation. In 1974, 17% of our electricity was generated by oil-burning power plants. By 1985, that was down to 4.1% and 3% today -- a result of Carter's Fuel Use Act. Was that achieved by pouring huge resources into making oil plants more efficient, or by accepting a net reduction in the amount of power generated? No. It came about by substituting oil for another power source - nuclear fission plants, and electricity use and generation went up dramatically.

By contrast, his conservation attempts were failures - in the automotive sector we are more dependent on oil, and directly on foreign oil, than ever.

I'm of course aware that the increase in oil use happened in spite of efficiency gains. That's my point - that the best efficiency gains can do is slow down the growth of use, which means you still lose.

Rather than conservation, we need a switching policy.

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