Gas Prices

[diyer2]

Roof mounted solar is cheaper than ground mounted, thus keeping the install price down. Ground mount is easier to work on and do maintenance. If I ever have solar again it will be ground mount. Also in the city roof mount gets more sun in most cases due to lot size.

[customboss]

1 minute ago, diyer2 said:

Roof mounted solar is cheaper than ground mounted, thus keeping the install price down. Ground mount is easier to work on and do maintenance. If I ever have solar again it will be ground mount. Also in the city roof mount gets more sun in most cases due to lot size.

I have fantastic southern exposure here , brutal intense sun 12 months out of the year and when I save up enough plan to install solar and sell it back to our electric CO-OP.

 

[garagerog]

I hope those Florida solar farms aren't displacing citrus orchards or other farm land. As an old farm boy I'm concerned that the push for renewables at any cost will displace farm land. We need to eat almost as much as we need the juice for the blockchain people (sarcasm intended).  Wind turbines can be farmed around and they may kill off some of those pesky crows that eat corn but the same can't be said for the solar farms. In short food security and independence are as important as energy and in fact are intertwined, farmers need the diesel!

[customboss]

1 minute ago, garagerog said:

I hope those Florida solar farms aren't displacing citrus orchards or other farm land. As an old farm boy I'm concerned that the push for renewables at any cost will displace farm land. We need to eat almost as much as we need the juice for the blockchain people (sarcasm intended).  Wind turbines can be farmed around and they may kill off some of those pesky crows that eat corn but the same can't be said for the solar farms. In short food security and independence are as important as energy and in fact are intertwined, farmers need the diesel!

Why we need a national plan. Then execute it but we can't agree on anything so we are splitting into red vs blue on everything. Pretty dumb situation because as you mention people will suffer and starve. 

[customboss]

For refreshment of memories here and those that don't remember the administration in 1971 imposed a 90 price freeze and we had our first energy crisis.  Next one was 1973 when OPEC shut us down.  

 

"August 15, 1971, forever lives in energy infamy. President Nixon’s 90-day price freeze, as extended, disabled the impersonal market forces coordinating supply and demand. Petroleum shortages began the next year, and the industry was fast-tracked to allocation controls and a suite of government programs to increase supply or reduce demand (“gapism”).

The 1970s energy crisis was underway well before the Arab Oil embargo of October 1973. But the narrative became that OPEC caused the shortages, requiring government to discourage oil imports and otherwise promote “energy security.”

In February 1973 Senate hearings, Henry Jackson (D-WA) concluded:

One, there has been an unprecedented breakdown in our energy supply and distribution system; Two, the fuel shortages now being experienced are far more extensive than anticipated; Three, more severe shortages of fuels, particularly gasoline, are in the offing.

For the foreseeable future, the Ford Foundation’s tome A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future (1974) stated: The energy crisis is real and long-lived; conservation is as important as supply; and, the U.S. needs an integrated national energy policy.”

And it all began with Nixon’s Executive Order 11615—Providing for Stabilization of Prices, Rents, Wages, and Salaries—pursuant to the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970.

Background

The 37^th president of the United States got on the wrong side of economic law three years before his resignation by imposing the first peacetime wage-and-price controls in American history.

The business community and labor reined in surprise to offer pragmatic support. John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson offered quick congratulations. One notable dissented. “I regret exceedingly … a ninety-day freeze on prices and wages,” Milton Friedman wrote in Newsweek. “That is one of those ‘very plausible schemes … with very pleasing commencements [that] have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.’”

Nixon’s action inspired Ayn Rand’s two-part series, The Moratorium on Brains. Murray Rothbard wrote: “On August 15, 1971, fascism came to America.” But the public, believing the “Nixon shock” would check inflation, was generally supportive.

The critics were right. Confirming Friedman’s insight that “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program,” Nixon’s Phase I turned into Phase II, Phase III, Phase III½, and Phase IV. Worse, petroleum was singled out for continued tip-to-toe regulation under the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973 (EPAA), which would not be revoked until early 1981.

Government Failure

The propensity of government intervention to expand from its own shortcomings defined U.S. energy policy in the 1970s. Price deregulation, meanwhile, was off the table.

First, federal bureaucracies managed the shortage with a variety of edicts. Congressional hearings in March 1973 on energy conservation, a first, attracted testimony from the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club.

Second, different price tiers for physically identical crude (old oil, new oil, etc.) required a very complicated, politicized program to equalize prices for refineries. Third, federal authorities restarted programs to turn relatively plentiful coal into natural gas and oil (synfuel programs would be abandoned). Fourth, the U.S created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to prepare for another oil-import crisis (it never came).

The initial EPAA regulations covering 27 pages in the Federal Register would burgeon into more than 5,000 pages in its first two years. By the time it was over seven years later, there would be “no fewer than six different regulatory agencies and seven distinct price control regimes, each successively more complicated and pervasive.”

Politics were rampant. Between 1977 and 1980, more than 300 energy bills were considered in Congress. State legislatures considered countless more.

Even ardent interventionists would throw in the towel. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) complained about the “outrageous weed garden of regulation.” James Schlesinger, the first head of the U.S. Department of Energy (created in 1977), called the experience “the political equivalent of Chinese water torture.”

And it all started with Nixon’s “temporary” price control order, with energy an afterthought.

Analytic Failure

Physical shortages of oil (and natural gas under a different regulatory regime) misled economists into thinking that mineral resources, fixed and thus depletable, had a logic of their own. Harold Hotelling, whose journal article, “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources” (1931), mathematically proved how mineral extraction was an increasing-cost industry, was resurrected.

The new subdiscipline of resource or energy economics produced countless articles applying Hotelling’s Rule (“user cost”) to the data of increased scarcity. M. King Hubbert proclaimed victory for his geology-based Peak Oil and Peak Gas predictions. A spreading neo-Malthusian movement, which found voice in Paul Ehrlich and in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972), captured the intellectual class.

Scattered dissent such as from Julian Simon and M. A. Adelman was drowned out. And little known, Ludwig von Mises in a single paragraph in 1940 rejected the very notion that non-reproducible minerals possessed a special scarcity value.

Deregulation and the 1980s quieted the depletionists. Oil and gas, after all, are manufactured goods. Had not Mises stated in Human Action that “deposits of mineral substances and their exploitation are not characterized by features which would give a particular mark to human action dealing with them?” And if market forces were appropriate, why did government need to augment supply and/or reduce demand?

Conclusion

A surplus of regulation, not a shortage of oil or gas, caused the 1970s crisis. “When the black day of August 15, 1971 arrived,” Murray Rothbard reminisced, “we free-market economists predicted that shortages of all sorts of products would result….” Added Ayn Rand: “The Arab oil embargo was not the cause of the energy crisis in this country: it was merely the straw that showed that the camel’s back was broken.”

The 1970s stand as one of most grievous eras in the history of energy, and public policy in general. And it happened as a byproduct of a seemingly innocuous, temporary government intervention.

One of the great “ifs” of U.S. political economy is: What would have happened if prices had not been regulated and oil markets could have spontaneously adjusted to the Arab embargo? Higher prices would have resulted in lower prices later on, avoiding shortages and government involvement. And today, energy would be somewhat less political and more nondescript.

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Robert L. Bradley Jr.

Robert L. Bradley Jr., AIER Senior Fellow, is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research. He is author of eight books on energy history and public policy and blogs at MasterResource.

Bradley received a B.A. in economics from Rollins College, an M.A. in economics from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in political economy from International College.

He has been a Schultz Fellow for Economic Research and Liberty Fund Fellow for Economic Research, and in 2002 he received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award for his work on energy and sustainable development."

[customboss]

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo

 

"Oil Embargo, 1973–1974

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo against the United States in retaliation for the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military and to gain leverage in the post-war peace negotiations. Arab OPEC members also extended the embargo to other countries that supported Israel including the Netherlands, Portugal, and South Africa. The embargo both banned petroleum exports to the targeted nations and introduced cuts in oil production. Several years of negotiations between oil-producing nations and oil companies had already destabilized a decades-old pricing system, which exacerbated the embargo’s effects......"

 

71 and 74 have common thread.

 

We were dependent on fossil fuels, oil companies ,even US domestic ones will not produce for USA, they will sell it to highest bidder. 

 

COVID and pandemics, wars have deleterious effects on energy prices.  If a nation is dependent on ANYTHING commodity wise they are subject to the whims of those that supply that commodity. 

 

If we don't learn old lessons we repeat them.  We can't GO BACKWARDS or sit still or we suffer like the consumer and working man and woman is now. 

 

 

[KARNUT]

25 minutes ago, customboss said:

Old news and you are wrong again, Texas is an abject failure on its own grid. You are probably about to find out in the heat of the summer, like you did in the freeze of the winter. 

 

I guess the question for us all is why are we struggling to supply appropriate power and fuels? 

 

Maybe we are too dependent on fossil fuels?

 

Energy policy to slanted towards fossil fuels? 

 

Do we agree that climate change is a thing or just a BS political move?  

 

All our complaints here about fuel costs are based on those questions and how we view them.  

 

Stan I am just countering your biased mis-info best I can. Its not personal you are just Koolaid ingesting and I suggest staying away from Jim Jones types. 

 

Having worked in the lubricants and fuels industry for 42 years before retiring I can tell you that US is dependent on fossil fuels still.  We need to diversify and use the technologies that work to counter dependence on those products. Its why we are whining here about gasoline costs. It matters. 

 

 

 

 

We have more fossil fuel than we can use in many life times. More than enough time to get alternative fuel right. It’s being rushed because of payola. I’m from the field talked  to the movers and shakers of the industry. Not a desk jockey pushing theories. The people you’re alining with are responsible for our current situation. That ship is sinking, time to jump. That’s my quota with you for the day.

[customboss]

12 minutes ago, KARNUT said:

We have more fossil fuel than we can use in many life times. More than enough time to get alternative fuel right. It’s being rushed because of payola. I’m from the field talked  to the movers and shakers of the industry. Not a desk jockey pushing theories. The people you’re alining with are responsible for our current situation. That ship is sinking, time to jump. That’s my quota with you for the day.

Sad that facts make no impact on you.....good news is younger folks can read and are about to have the burning tire of our last 50 years of mistakes to deal with.  My thoughts and prayers are with you. 

[swathdiver]

31 minutes ago, garagerog said:

I hope those Florida solar farms aren't displacing citrus orchards or other farm land. 

In many instances that I saw, they are!  Bad again!

 

Oil is the life blood of prosperity and freedom.  Without oil, a society is not prosperous and cannot defend itself.  Global Cooling, Global Warming and now Climate Change is the same Communist plan to destroy America while laundering money to corrupt politicians.  

 

American Communists, like all of them, create nothing and destroy everything.  Remember when paper bags were destroying the earth?  Now their plastic bags are destroying the earth.  They are the ones working tirelessly to destroy the oil and gas industry and cease our use of the natural resources God has given us.

 

Oil does not come from dead dinosaurs or the vegetation from the flood.  That's another set of lies.  It's made deep down in the earth.  Ironically, the Soviets discovered this during the Cold War, they were forced to drill down two and three times deeper than the west and made the discovery.  

 

Sam's Club - $4.729 for 93 octane.

[JimCost2014]

50 minutes ago, customboss said:

you are just Koolaid ingesting and I suggest staying away from Jim Jones types. 

 

Sooo, you are saying maybe make new plans for this weekend

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by JimCost2014

[richard wysong]

they are spending $40m to set up a marshalling yard for offshore wind at the site of an old power plant over in Salem, Mass

[richard wysong]

solar is everywhere, many many houses and farms popping up everywhere. Even Walmart has sent me emails that they do solar installations. my understanding with the residential systems is that after the 20 years when you finally own the system the inverters have reached the end of their life expectancy and are very expensive to replace

[diyer2]

This was a great company when I was doing Solar. https://www.solar-electric.com/

Dig around and learn something.

[swathdiver]

1 hour ago, richard wysong said:

solar is everywhere, many many houses and farms popping up everywhere. Even Walmart has sent me emails that they do solar installations. my understanding with the residential systems is that after the 20 years when you finally own the system the inverters have reached the end of their life expectancy and are very expensive to replace

Research done long ago showed me that the panels themselves were done for after about 8-10 years.  This was ten or fifteen years ago.

[shakenfake]

@swathdiverIt has changed a lot since then. Solar has improved and actually is pretty viable.