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ottopilot, it's difficult for me to understand your questions.... ANWR is an insignificant project of, at best, long way off insignificant impact, given what it will add to the daily total world oil production "some day", and given chronic US consumption of 25 percent of all world daily production. Why would the current crude price be influenced by the "some day" event of ANWR adding...what.... a wildly optimistic 2 million bbls per day to an 85 million bbls per day total world output? Where do you think the rest of US domestic oil production numbers will be, along with the output numbers of the UK, considering it's recent dramatic decline, and likewise, Mexico's, and the recent fifth largest crude oil exporter, Norway be at, if and when ANWR delivers at it's highest potential? How much will US and rest of the world demand have grown when ANWR demonstrates it's first million bbls per day?

Will this hoped for "influence" of ANWR, not be checked by "stuff" like:
Does our government launch an incessant propaganda campaign intent on demonizing the Saudi king and his country as a prelude to bombing the shit out of them and invading them to provoke "regime change", while we cling to fantasies about "ANWR" as a solution to maintaining "our way of life", or do we examine our own close minded wastefulness and inefficiency in our energy use, along with the manipulation achieved through "free markets" advocacy:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...23&postcount=2 ?

and:

Your "speculators" reference is...what???...when it is compared to the doubling of the value of the Euro vs. the US dollar in just the last 6 years. Do you really believe that "speculators" are raising the price of crude oil and indefinitely keeping it at high levels? How come the price of crude is lower, in terms of purchases of it with gold or with Euros, compared to a few years ago? Wouldn't it make more sense to accuse "speculators" of driving the valuation of the dollar down, than driving and holding crude prices higher, since the Euro and gold have been exempted from effects of these speculators manipulation?


When the current fiscal year ends on this coming Sept. 30, the increase in the national debt will be at least $700 billion since last October 1st. There were 136 million federal income tax returns filed for the tax year ending in 2006. Add 14 million additional tax payers who did not file or were not required to file, and you have a figure of 150 million tax filings. $700 billion is an average $4666 per filing.

If each tax filing represents an average, because of driving aged dependents and jointly filed tax returns....of say.... 900 US gallons of annual aggregate gasoline purchases (900 gals. X 20 MPG = 18,000 miles, instead of the average individual vehicle total miles driven of 12,000 miles....) at most, the impact of increased gasoline prices per tax filing would be $2.00 per gallon multiplied by 900 gallons purchased.... $1800. Gasoline will not average as much as a $2.00 per gallon increase for all of 2008 vs. in 2007, and average fuel economy is probably greater than 20 MPG for the US privately owned passenger vehicle fleet.

Oil is still mostly priced in and sold for dollars on world markets and the Euro buys twice as many dollars as it did in 2002. If oil sells for twice as many dollars as it sold for in 2002, oil has not increased in price at all, in terms of the Euro, and it actually requires less gold in exchange for any measure of oil as was required to exchange the same amount of oil for gold in 2002.

Why has the dollar fallen to just half the valuation it was bid up to in 2002, vs. the Euro?

Dramatically higher US federal deficits viewed in the rest of the world as unsustainable, mitigated by huge increases in military and intelligence gathering/analysis expenses.

Dramatically higher US trade deficits aggravated by the increased costs of importing 14 million bbls of petroleum and petroleum equivalents, on average, each and every day....growing debt viewed as unsustainable in the rest of the world.

Dramatically lowered interest rates vs. the rate policy of the European central bank....the Federal reserve lowered a key short term interest rate from 5-1/4 to just 2 percent in just the past 8 months, a rate drop of more than 60 percent. Just as oil is priced, world currencies are priced via auction bid futures contracts. Selling dollars and buying Euros results in earning much higher rates of return on low risk bank deposits of Euros in European banks than can be achieved by dollar deposits in US banks.

US government military, foreign, and financial policy has done no better than a cat chasing it's own tail for the last few years. The next presidential administration is already set up to fail because of this seemingly insurmountable and increasingly deteriorating dollar valuation decline.

The US must change perceptions by rapidly and dramatically decreasing it's government spending deficits and trade deficits, raise interest rates, import much less, export much more, and appear to be less burdened by war operational and military expenses.

A great way to begin the task without crippling tourism would be with innovative but seemingly extreme emergency regulations. I propose a ban on all automobile travel of less than 50 miles distance from home, exempted only when passenger vehicles contain two adults who are not relatives or residents in the same household. You are required to take an effing neighbor or some guy who lives four houses down from you for the past ten years who you've, up until now, only waved to when you've driven by as he mowed his front lawn. The restriction would help to make childless folks who live alone feel that they were receiving equal consideration.

Going to the grocery store or out for a restaurant meal....commuting to work...? Not in your car, you aren't....unless you share the trip and half of the gasoline formerly consumed in close to home car trips, which means most trips.

Require that deliveries of consumer goods by wholesale to retail of non-perishable items (Budweiser....Coca-cola...), or longer duration perishable's (Thomas's English muffins.... Frito-Lays chips...) be cut in half... twice per week instead of daily. Retailers can either find ways to accept and store larger but fewer deliveries, or experience out of stock periods, on occasion.

Our currency is sinking, and it is the key to sustaining our recent increased militarism and internal social order. Significantly cut petroleum consumption lowers world demand and US imports, lowering the US trade deficit and prices paid at the pump, increasing perception that a reversal of dollar decline pressures is possible, strengthening the dollar more than the actual influence of a declining trade deficit number.

A law requiring you to travel everywhere you go locally with a non-related person of at least driving age, of your own chosing, is kind of a small price to pay to instill both an awareness of a crisis and a feeling that there is some way to personally have a favorable impact on the problem. More so if half the time you are the non-paying passenger on the local trip!

I'm ending two weeks spent on the west coast, today. On my first trip out here in 1972, it seemed that every other vehicle was a VW sedan or a VW micro bus. The remnants of that now nearly 40 years old fleet is still visible; I've seen more old beetles and buses than I've seen anywhere else in a long time. I saw a '59 VW running down the Coast highway north of Santa Monica yesterday. I knew it was a '59 because my father bought a new '60 model in October of '59. The improvements were a larger rear window in the '60 model and a lowered back bumper that was not mounted high enought to obscure the tail lights. I hadn't seen a VW with that small rear window and high mounted rear bumper in a long time.....

My point is that the 30 MPG VW, so popular on the west coast and in the rest of the country in the 60's and 70's has a successor now, if you know to look for it. Every tenth car I've seen out here is a Toyota Prius gasoline/electirc Hybrid. I rented one myself since last friday, and I've averaged nearly 50 MPG. This car gets better fuel mileage in city driving than on the open road because it is propelled by the energy generated from braking the vehicle, converted to electricity stored in it's battery, when moving in stop and go traffic. The Prius is allowed to travel in California HOV lanes without multiple occupants because of it's low polluting and fuel consuming performance.

The problem is that, while my father's October 1959 purchase of a new 1960 VW beetle cost $1600, out the door, the 2008 Toyota Prius costs a minimum of $23,000 with tax and licensing fees. There will be no money saved by purchasing the Prius, because aside from it's hybrid design, it is not constructed or outfitted with the features of the average conventional sedan costing that amount. A Prius owner who travels 12,000 miles per year would have purchased 400 gallons of gasoline if he drove a new $17,000 sedan achieving 30 MPG, with the same non-hybrid features offered in the Prius. At $4.00 per gallon, the $17,000 sedan consumes $1,600 worth of fuel to travel 12,000 miles. The Prius, averaging 50 MPG, consumes 160 gallons less gasoline to travel 12,000 miles. The savings is 160 gallons X $4.00.... $640...but the Prius cost $6,000 extra to purchase, compared to the similarly equipped 30 MPG sedan.

I'm hoping that presenting "the math" in this post will help reach a few readers . I don't think technology will be cheap enough, quick enough, to justify a change that results in every tenth car, nationwide, being a Toyota Prius. I also have the experience of dropping off a couple of Mexican friends at their homes on a regular basis after work. The lots at their apartment complexes are jammed full with the gas guzzling, recent model SUV's and pickups traded in by the new Prius owners. I saw the same phenomena in lower income neighborhoods in the late 70's and early 80's. Streets filled with parked late model Buick, Chevy, and Cadillac cars. People of limited means always choose reliability and perceived value above fuel economy when the market is flooded with the gas guzzling cast offs of the well to do....

We in the US are living in a crisis period, but it isn't a fuel crisis, it is a currency valuation fundamentals crisis, aggravated by a huge dose of denial. The denial is featured in some of the posts in this thread, and is the reason why so many think it is "normal" for a post industrial economy country with just 6 percent of the world's population, to consume 25 percent of all petroleum sold each and every day across the world. It isn't "normal".