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Coming soon, to a pump near YOU…

Livermore Oil Well

Yesterday, I thought that I would: drive my half-full (not half-empty) 1996 Toyota pickup truck (155,000 miles on the odometer) to Costco (a wholesale “warehouse club”), fill up the tank at $4.339/U.S. gallon for regular gasoline, drive the truck home, park it in my driveway, and let the gasoline APPRECIATE! :-)

At this point, all of you folks in other countries who are paying FAR MORE for gasoline can just sit on the sidelines of this blog, without personal involvement. You folks in OTHER parts of the United States, who are paying a lot less, can  expect to pay a lot MORE soon (except maybe Texas)! :-)

Costco has about the least expensive gas prices around here. Three days ago, the average price of a U.S. gallon (as opposed to an “Imperial gallon”) of gasoline in San Francisco was $4.479. Over the weekend, I spoke to a brother of mine in another state (not the one in Texas) who had recently paid $3.80-something/gallon. On May 23, I paid $3.919/gallon at CostcoI have recently blogged about the apparent role of California (historically and today) as a test market for “what the market will bear” in the continental U.S. Then the prices seemingly get distributed to the other states. I noted with amazement today, as I pumped slightly less than one gallon of regular gasoline into the tank of my 1100 cc Honda Shadow Spirit motorcycle, that the price of gasoline at Costco  had held constant at $4.339/gallon OVERNIGHT! :-)

(Update 11:07 PM, June 9, 2008: On the KTVU newscast tonight, reporters interviewed customers at a Shell Oil station in Redwood City, on the peninsula, and prices for regular were $4.999/gallon, with the price expected to exceed $5/gallon “possibly as soon as tomorrow” according to the station owner. Meanwhile, according the same broadcast, the price of crude oil dropped $4/barrel today.)

(Note on June 13, 2008: On Tuesday, June 10, 2008, Republicans in the U.S. Congress blocked a proposal to tax the windfall profits of the nation’s largest oil companies and eliminate some of their tax breaks [no surprise THERE!]. In apparent appreciation, :-) the price at the pump at Costco on Wednesday jumped 2 cents/gallon to $4.359 for regular gasoline, when I stopped there to put slightly more than one gallon of gas into my Honda Shadow Spirit!  [I hate to think how much the price must have jumped at OTHER stations.] I have not been to the gas station since then, because it is just not as much FUN as it used to be! :-) By the way, the photo at the top of this blog entry is of one of SEVERAL oil wells within Livermore, itself, because California is an oil-producing state. In addition, there are a number of oil REFINERIES in the Bay Area, so people here sometimes wonder [but not really :-) ] why gas prices here are so high.)

Apparently, some oil company executives have already accomplished the kind of damage to the U.S. economy that some foreign terrorists could not even wildly HOPE to do…and the damage continues, seemingly without serious objections or protests in California. So today, I looked up the word “terrorism” in the dictionary, since I do not make up my own definitions for words. I found the (somewhat circular) definition to be “The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.” So I then looked up “terror” and among the definitions were: 1) a state of intense fear 2b) a frightening aspect 2c) a cause of anxiety. Hmmmmm……. :-)

So, on your next visit to California, you folks from a lot of other countries can enjoy the favorable (for you) currency exchange rate and cheap gas prices, and you folks from many other states in the U.S. can dig deeper into your pockets.

As for Californians – I have noticed a lot of new motorcycles, scooters, and fuel-efficient automobiles on the road lately, which only means that the petroleum industry can sell us the same gas later, at a higher price. :-) But all and all, the use of these vehicles is a “good thing,” because a cut in demand just may provide government with the time that it always takes for governments to react (since it will probably be the post-election U.S. government anyway), besides all of the environmental benefits (e.g. a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions) that a cut in fuel consumption brings.

-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™

You can view higher-resolution photos (*generally* 7-30 megabytes, compressed) at the Cheshire Cat Photo™ Pro Gallery on Shutterfly™, where you can also order prints and gifts decorated with the photos of your choice from the gallery. Apparel and other gifts decorated with some of our most popular photos can be ordered from the Cheshire Cat Photo™ Store on CafePress®. Both Shutterfly™ and CafePress® ship to most international locations worldwide!  

1 Comment to “Coming soon, to a pump near YOU…”

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Must be a timely subject. I’ve had exchanges <a href=”http://twitter.com/peterliu47″on Twitter about this very thing lately, and I’m surprised our prices in Maui aren’t the highest in the nation (like they usually are). I just blogged a bunch of scary movies and a book on this topic myself.

Peter Liu said this on June 10th, 2008 at 5:07 pm


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