these gas companies and elected leaders need a because this increase is all , do they think we are prepared for something like this. Something has got to give, no one is immune to the economic impact this is going to have. I am that we just take this in Canada, other countries would of been at war by now or protesting. This economy is so on the big oil companies and the governments that just stand by and do nothing.

Their marketing people are/have been very smart people and joe public just keeps falling into their marketing traps...and the best part - we blame it all on the government. As for competion laws...they are useless when it comes to gas pricing...they have figured out how to get around those as well.

What would you like the government to do. Oil trades on an the New York Mercantile Exchange , how could they manipulate the market? Want to blame someone, blame China, the more they develop industry the more energy will cost worldwide. STOP BUYING CRAP FROM CHINA!

How about pump our own oil? Maybe find alternatives like hydrogen?

How about pump our own oil? Maybe find alternatives like hydrogen? Or how about taking the Iraqi oil that we should own. LOL

How about pump our own oil? Maybe find alternatives like hydrogen? Or how about taking the Iraqi oil that we should own. LOL

How about pump our own oil? Maybe find alternatives like hydrogen? Or how about taking the Iraqi oil that we should own. LOL

Why is it not the goverments fault?They could drop the taxes on fuel in half and still make what they did on tax when we payed 50cents/lt.

On a different view of gas prices,how about this.I think fuel is still cheap at 1$/lt.People buy 500ml. bottle of water for over 1$. and don't say shit.

Maybe find alternatives like hydrogen?

I would love to go and spend new dollars and replace the car with something more fuel efficent. You know what happens then, the oil companies don't sell enough gas and the price goes up anyhow. We can't win because we just like to take it up the @$$ I guess.

First of all, all the talk about gas prices rising is, in my opinion, just prepping the public to accept higher prices this summer. If we hear lots of talk about gas going to $1.40, months ahead of time, we'll all be expecting it, and it won't be such a shock when it happens. A great way for the oil companies to increase prices without a major uproar I think.

More importantly though, as much as it will kill me if gas does get that expensive this summer (if it's $1.40 at the pumps can you imagine what it's going to be at the marina? $1.80 at least. Running through 75 liters a day in the boat is not going to help my visa bills) I reall ythink gas is still too cheap to really encourage us to make the necessary changes to reduce consumption. Buying smaller cars, switching to alternative energies, reducing our dependancy on cars all need to happen, but like everything else, these changes are going to be driven by our pocket books, by market forces, and nothing else.

I get a kick out of people blaming the government for the price of gas. The government cannot control the price of gas with out throwing the economy into serious turmoil, much more serious then we're going to see with market driven gas prices.

Do you really want to see lower gas prices? Stop buying so much gas, that's the only solution.

OIL will be the cause of the fall of America, not in our life time but it will happen as it has time after time all through history (Roman Empire no one at the time could imagine this falling yet it did in a short time)

More importantly though, as much as it will kill me if gas does get that expensive this summer (if it's $1.40 at the pumps can you imagine what it's going to be at the marina? $1.80 at least. Running through 75 liters a day in the boat is not going to help my visa bills)

Ok course expecting Gov't to intervene is a huge unknown to regular folk like us - I have no clue how that system works.

But I do remember reading how Exon oil posted a 40billion dollar profit last year and in the states when Microsoft was posting huge profits the gov't started watching everything they did and then started forcing them to change how they sold and marketed their product to the masses - when it was starting to look like a monoploy they acted - We have how many oil companies?? Not many I expect, and because they do all stay at the same price they kinda act like a monopoly.

I would like to see the Gov't make some kind of effort to reign in the massive profits these companies make mainly because we are looking at a recession or economic slowdown. I'm not a scoialist - I run my own small business and am a big fan of profit - Economics is a very complicated subject - but I believe that if gas spikes that high and they are maintianing huge profits then our slowdown or recession will be deeper and harder then it really needs to be. People traveling less, especially if you are getting layed off, less money spent because more time at home!! It gets complicated, but no less real a threat to our economy.

Two times when oil hit $100 a barrel the idgit analysts were wrong about the price of gasoline. 1st time it hit they said, it would affect the price. What happened? The price went up. The next time it hit $100, they said the price of gas would go up. What happened? It went down.

These "analysts" are as useful as weathermen.

What would you like the government to do. Oil trades on an the New York Mercantile Exchange , how could they manipulate the market? Want to blame someone, blame China, the more they develop industry the more energy will cost worldwide. STOP BUYING CRAP FROM CHINA!

I saw on a U.S news channel that the price of oil was $28.00 a barrel when Bush took office 8 years ago and now that he is leaving it is $105 a barrel. Isn't Bush an oil man ?????

Grubber

if it went to 50$/L you would still buy it..

also it still costs the same to bring it to the pumps.. oil companies are laughing... just need to replace oil with something else...
Water/hydrogen would be a start...
fill up with water, have a converter to hydrogen... burns it makes water as exhaust.. back into the tank and burn again...

drive 1,000,000 km's on 5 gallons of water and at the end... still 5 gallons left..
i fell i will be killed now just for saying this...

nuke powered cars/sleds???

hehe.. just a though.. only way to bring the prices down is to find something else to replace it..

if it went to 50$/L you would still buy it..

also it still costs the same to bring it to the pumps.. oil companies are laughing... just need to replace oil with something else...
Water/hydrogen would be a start...
fill up with water, have a converter to hydrogen... burns it makes water as exhaust.. back into the tank and burn again...

drive 1,000,000 km's on 5 gallons of water and at the end... still 5 gallons left..
i fell i will be killed now just for saying this...

It's not a 100% conversion rate unforuntately, I mean energy has to come and go somewhere, if you could just recycle the same 5gal forever then we would have solved the universes energy crisis, so no 1,000,000km on 5gal own't happen lol. Good thought though

The problem with todays alternatives is that we, as a human population, are too numerous to support ANY alternative. Let's see just how "clean" clean energies are:

-ethanol, recently I heard eth actually produces AS much harmful toxins as gasoline does. If the whole world switched to it can you imagine the amount of crops we need to make in order to support it? As it stands there isn't enough food to feed the world as a whole, imagine if the -entire- world ran off of food for a fuel too.

-solar. I love how solar is touted as the 100% cleanest energy out there. What you don't see is what's "under the hood". Imagine every single car in the world suddenly turned solar. Perfect, no emissions or pollution right? Wrong. Every solar car is LOADED with batteries. Batteries filled with highly toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Unforuntately you can't take energy straight from a panel and turn it into driving power unlike your trusty calculator. Imagine just how many batteries would then fill our worlds dumps and oceans if EVERYONE now ran on batteries? It would be crippling.

-water powered cars. They are still somewhat fantasy but let's say a water powered car burns water and the only emission is steam. Can you imagine what that would do to our weather patterns? If every car in the world produced steam where it went? Every city that used to have a "smog dome" over it would now be creating steam domes which would make their own weather, alter seasonal precip, and even block sunrays.

The one key problem we have is there are too many of us to support any "magical cure" of clean energy. No matter how clean something IS it turns very dirty when applied to billions of people.

Sorry that's a bit off topic, guess I just wandered a bit lol.

Batteries can be setup for recycling so they don't end up in a dump. Put a return fee on them like beer bottles and they will make their way to the recycling plants instead of the garbage. Beer bottles have like a 98% return rate I heard, that's pretty damn good.

Monopoly is right. Here's what I don't get:

A hurricane starts heading into florida, the price of bottled water goes up 9000% and hotel rooms go up for 5000$ a night. The government sees this and lays "gouging" (gougeing? spelling?) charges for companies ripping people off.
Flip side.
A hurricane "threatens" to come ashore near some oil rigs. ALL THE PRICES OF GAS GO UP IMMEDIATELY because we may "lose" some oil. The hurricane never hits, prices stay up.
What's the difference other than the government will charge the little guy screwing the little guy but not the big guy screwing the little guy?

Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage
By Chris Demorro
Staff Writer

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.

The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?

You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.


So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.