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Thousand Oaks

The real price of gasoline

We Americans are acutely aware when the cost of gasoline rises and falls. We are a commuter society and spend a significant portion of our earnings filling up our tanks. Those of us who live in California pay the highest prices in the nation – approximately $5 per gallon these days. But we actually pay significantly more in less obvious ways.

Direct taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel producers ($20 billion); military spending to protect our access to oil and gas around the globe ($85 billion); capping 2 to 3 million leaking hazardous oil and gas wells fossil fuel producers have walked away from (estimated at $40 billion). In addition, there are other opaque but burdensome costs in the form of damage to public health from breathing fossil fuel toxins.
The bottom line is we’re already paying for all the above with our tax dollars, and any true capitalist should be incensed.

The men and women working in our coal, oil and gas industries need our support to transition to good paying clean energy jobs, which are starting to dominate the energy sector in the U.S and around the world. If the U.S doesn’t lead we will be purchasing these technologies from foreign competitors, resulting in lost jobs and higher prices.

You don’t need to believe in global warming or climate change or be a Noble Laurent economist to see that our fossil fuel industry is being financially propped up these days, resulting in artificially low gasoline prices, slowing down the transition to a more affordable, secure and healthier environment.

As a military veteran, I’m concerned that our reliance on old more expensive technologies is resulting in a national security threat. We don’t need to put our military service men and women in harms way around the world, protecting oil and gas reserves in foreign countries, when there is a better, more affordable way to do it in our own back yard.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Here in the Netherlands we pay about $7.50 for a gallon (2 euros a litre). The prices of gas and electricity are linked to the oil price, so life becomes unaffordable, even for people without a car. Double gas price compared to last year. The tax on energy is higher than your consumption.
    And since the introduction of the Euro, prices have already doubled.
    Living in the Netherlands will be made impossible for you this winter.
    And in the US it’s not much betterI read.
    I daily read the Conejo Guardian, greetings…….Peter Prince.

  2. It’s so frustrating reading the naive opinions of people who have no concept of just how much of our modern existence relies upon the availability of cheap fossil fuels. The fallacy peddlers love to speak of the easy and readily available renewable alternative. The fraudulent promotion of renewable energy as an equivalent to fossil fuel energy is leading the naive to choose a way of life that they will forever regret.
    The whole reason people are so willing to accept the push to switch to the so called renewable energy, is because they have been hammered by the constant propaganda from the renewable energy industry and an entire educational institutionalized global warming cabal.
    What most people don’t understand is that when you thoroughly analyze all the factors that will come into play when you force people to switch to alternative energy, it is a far more inferior and expensive way of living than they could ever imagine. People just don’t understand how pervasive everything in our modern existence relies on the availability of cheap oil to make the comforts we all take for granted. And when they finally wake up to the outrageous cost of every product that they just took for granted, they will be shocked. And it wont just be a silly inconvenience or a higher price issue. It will mean many products that we now have, will suddenly no longer be available.
    Just try to imagine how many times you use a product that is made from oil? It is staggering to think that plastic will become a very expensive and very scarce commodity. Plastic is so pervasive in every aspect of our lives that the impact will be very interesting to see how it is phased out. But secretly the ridiculous plan is to allow China to operate business as usual with not even the slightest pollution standards or reduction in fossil fuel exploration and production.
    What the plan is going to mean to the world is that pollution will be worse than ever and China will be the richest most powerful country in the world and no one will be free or able to determine their own future. And any other country that can take advantage of the vast quantities of oil deposits will be rich and powerful, except foolish and short sighted virtue signaling countries like the U.S. will be able to whine and complain that the air and water is killing the consumers of renewable clean energy.
    And the funniest part of this demonizing of fossil fuels is that it will make the price of renewable energy products out of reach the the majority of consumers.
    But, don’t worry, your Chinese overseers will help out the poor unfortunate with no way to stay warm and no way to cook their food, I promise.

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