Smithers MINNEAPOLIS

Can’t come fast enough. Maybe Mrs. Champs and I will get a summer weekend to ourselves and our friends instead of driving halfway around the state keeping up with cousin so-and-so’s graduation/wedding/reunion.

Hey, maybe it’ll be the prod you need to get back on your bike! :^)

($4/gallon is doing it for me)

Seriously, given that the participants in this study are governments that are spending a lot of time figuring out (e.g. “OPEC”) how to prevent normal markets from operating, I’d take the result with a serious grain of salt. I’ll gladly admit I’m wrong, by the way, if they have a coherent analysis of “this is what the situation could have been had we NOT prevented major oilfields from coming into production.” I won’t be holding my breath, though.

And I would have gloated that oil company executives “schooled” many senators yesterday, but then I realized that for someone to “school” someone else, the recipient needs to be educable…..

“had we NOT prevented major oilfields from coming into production.”
………..or if we had heeded the warnings in the mid 70’s and started to seriously conserve and develop alternative sources, but then they couldn’t have skirted the CAFE standards and foisted the SUV onto our lame asses.

Hey, good news everybody. Im not making this up. I was watching Fox News on Friday night and they had a guy on that said if we open up all the areas that our off limits to drilling in the US, gas prices would drop to around $1.50 to 2.00 per gallon. So I guess the increased gas prices are a result of those crazy environmentalists
.Funny thing was he didnt mention the increased demand in Asia as a component in pricing determination.
He also didnt mention the fact that it takes years to bring these resources on-line
He also didnt mention the fact that the US supplies are minisculein comparison to fields in Eurasia and the middle east and anyone can tell you that it wouldnt make a dent in pricing.
Oh, I forgot that we also have President that allowed the energy companies to write the 2005 energy bill which gave huge tax breaks to US energy concerns while in large part dismissing conservation.
Oh, and by the way Bike Bubba, 90% of the worlds oil production emanates from state run oil concerns who seem to be doing just fine.
ignoring the dictates of the free market.

How many soldier lives does it take to fill a Hummer tank?

Amerikans won’t conserve non-renewable resources unless they pay the real value of the product, not just what it costs to harvest it.

Fuel now, water next, clean air last.

baba, it actually turns out that all of the major car companies, including those from the land of the rising sun, were improving both fuel economy and emissions faster prior to the establishment of the EPA and CAFE regulations. No kidding.

I’m all in favor of better efficiency, and my vehicles are pretty much best in class for the same. So is my house. I just don’t think that Congress can override the laws of supply and demand, as well as those of physics, to create products that the SAE cannot.

Oh, and those government-run oil producers doing just fine? Not really. Unemployment is 25% in Saudi Arabia, Iran imports gasoline, Malaysia subsidizes gasoline to keep its economy going, and Venezuela has gone into a recession as the price for its main product has skyrocketed. Mexico’s poverty is so grinding, it exports more citizens than oil. Outside of the wells and refineries, OPEC nations are generally economic basket cases.

And our oil fields miniscule? Not exactly. ANWR, oil shale, the Bakken formation in ND, and deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico may have more than 10x the recoverable petroleum than is currently developed. If Congress stays out of the way, $8/gallon fuel is not inevitable.

But if/when Congress screws things up (and both sides of the aisle are in the wrong on this), it sure will keep me, and maybe our gracious host, going on two skinny wheels.

RE: various comments.

This is shameful.

Weak-willed public representatives doing nothing more than posturing at big-oil with flash-in-the-pan questions that might as well be rhetorical when taken with the brazen oil company execs’ calous response to Senate questioning including tried-and-true BS answers such as “what I(we) think is best for the American public/people is (insert what’s actually best for the oil company).”

Where’s the accountability? What are we doing to make things better for ourselves AND others? We have forfeited our responsibilities as citizens in favor of pursuing careers as consumers. It’s easy to choose between hay-bales; anything more difficult and Americans ain’t interested. We’ve fooled ourselves into believing that a big economy and vast military make us strong; today’s Americans are more like bratty kids with rich parents who experienced an early growth spurt. Neither lasts forever. The rest of the world is catching up and we certainly aren’t acting like we’re prepared for life’s next step. I just hope we don’t end up in Juvie.

“I just don’t think that Congress can override the laws of supply and demand”
But Madison Avenue can. When I was a teenager, I and everyone I knew, wouldn’t be caught dead in a truck. I believe CARS and OIL looked at the CAFE standards and saw a huge drop in profits, and then trotted out the Gremlin, Pinto and Vega as the “answer”. When they failed (planned), they said that’s what you get when you want an economy car. Then they told us we would look great in a truck and the rest is history. My take, and I’ll stick with it.

Or it could simply be that families with campers and boats knew that nothing powered by a V6 or I4 at the time would tow their toys, and hence their natural aversion to a truck chassis was alleviated by their desire to take their annual vacation.

Sorry, but people still loved their trucks before CAFE came around. I knew plenty of them back in the 1970s, and 1960s magazines have plenty of ads for the Suburban, Wagoneer, and so on. (the Suburban’s been made since 1935, after all, and the Jeep is about the same vintage)