I'm In Love With My Car

I am in love with my car. In this case it is a Ford Escape Hybrid. I will point out that I was in love with my car long before gas prices, in my area, hit around $4.19 a gallon. When I got the Escape it was not to save money. With the amount of driving I do and the price of gas at the time, it would have taken 10+ years to make back the extra cost. The reason I bought it was due to not wanting to send any more money to other parts of the world if I don't have to. The less oil imported the better. Reduce carbon footprint was a distant second. On a side note, due to several reasons I could not get a smaller hybrid. The Escape was the best alternative that fit my needs.

Why are gas prices so high? It is really not a true supply and demand. Enough oil reaches the market to satisfy need. World capacity for producing oil is adequate. I do admit that if demand declined the price would most likely go down, but today's price has a huge "political" premium.

One example of why It is not a supply and demand issues is the refinery shut down of previous years. Oil needs to be refined to be used. When a hurricane hit and damaged US refineries the supply and demand model would have the price of oil go down while the price of refined products, like gasoline, would go up. That did not happen. Oil went up while refined product prices barely moved.

Now to contradict myself. Demand is affecting price in that oil is not a renewable resource. The countries, and companies, that produce oil see an end to their cash cow. These entities have figured out how to squeeze every last cent of profits from their ever reducing oil supply. So why is this happening now? Simply, the US is no longer the only thing that support the world economy. At one time, if the US economy slumped, the world economy slumped. As this current downturn has shown, the rest of the world can survive an economic slump in the US. So when will prices stop rising? Only when the market can not bare the cost.

There is good in all this. At a certain point the high cost of oil makes it more economically viable to invest in other sources of energy. As the largest economy and a capitalist society, we need this to drive the innovation that must occur. Doing it now, when we still have a decade before real supply issues occur, will help protect our economy and subsequently our way of life.

So am I saying that we should on conserve since it won't really help? No, we should for both economic and ecological reasons. The longer we can put off the real shortage of oil will give us more time to have converted over our oil needs to something else.

So what are my plans, besides driving a hybrid. Mostly the typical stuff; Drive less, buy local products, buy product that have less plastic (which is made from oil), reuse items when possible, etc. In the long run I plan to get solar power for my house and my next car will probably be an electric car. The car won't car if the power came from my solar power, a nuclear power plant, a "clean" coal power plant, or a current oil based plant.