We started talking about fuel prices in another post, so I am going to start another topic about this. Is everone suffering ? We are paying an unprecedented $AUS 1.40 or thereabouts a litre at the moment. I am so glad I have a small car and live on a bus route! Some people in the remote areas are paying another 20-30 cents a litre.
Any more stories about this?
I can’t drive, it’s not really getting me other than indirectly through other price rises (if any) which I haven’t noticed yet…
My friend told me that in Bakersfield (CA, USA) the gas was up to $3.50 a gallon. I don’t know the metric equivalent.. haha. just checked it on the very handy site " www.metric-conversions.org " and (if I did my math correctly) that should be 0.93 a litre, US. that’s still probably less than AUS (I’m assuming that’s Australian) $1.40/litre with the exchange rate and all. It’s still alot of money when compared to the current min. wage. $6.75, I believe. But I live 30 miles away from my school which I go to every day, and 10 miles, from the nearest town… Yeah, I have to drive alot. My mom works about 60 miles away… Yay for hybrid cars!!! (Don’t have one, but i desperately envy anyone who does.)
Milk prices have gone up in my area, too, strangely enough…
oh yeah, I also used www.exchangerate.com …
It looks as though $AUS 1.40 equates to about $US 1.08, but our government takes an enormous bite out of the fuel costs - I mean, they all drive around for nothing at our expense!
The one good thing is that it has gotten rid of a lot of those gas guzzling oversized SUV’s off the city streets. Most of them have never been driven in the country and why you need a 5 litre 4 wheel drive vehicle to drive to the supermarket has always puzzled me. 
I didn’t know we had much rough terrain around the suburbs of Adelaide!
Having a car here is not that killing - you can entirely fill your tank with some less than US$2. I don’t like that that much because there are better options, like natural gas, that would cost like US$0.20 (when expensive) to fill up the tank, or diesel, which is very cheap too, and both are way less poluting. But as nobody cares for their planet…
There is a Chevron (gas station) about a mile from where I live where the Premium gas is $3.49 USD per gallon. Eeks! I think that comes out to 0.75 € per litre (assuming exchange rate 1 USD = 0.813124 €).
So what is this in AUD? Um… I think $3.49 USD/gallon is equivalent to 1.19 AUD/litre (1 USD = 1.29905 AUD).
I’m using this formula to get from USD/gallon to X/litre, where X is some other type of currency : X = (USD * exchange rate) * 0.264.
I don’t know if this is correct, but I seem to have this formula in a conversion spreadsheet of mine.
Yes but of course your country is a fuel producer and so the citizens get their fuel at cost price, only fair as this gives the benefit back to all. Wait a minute - Australia is also an oil producer and we pay through the nose!!! And the profits all go to overseas oil companies!!! Mmm - and how do you emigrate to Venezuela?
Mariek - the spreadsheet probably has an old value for the Aust. $ - the value has changed quite a lot recently. I got the value off the sites Deuditus suggested.
Where I am, it hovers around 3 USD for “regular” grade. +10 cents per grade increase.
Gas prices around here are in the 3 USD a gallon range, a little less perhaps. My family does very little driving, so we do not pay close attention to gas prices. In the big city, walking and public transit suffice. The most direct impact on my life was a recent raise in bus fares, which (to me) seemed to come with less warning than usual. The raise in fares made me get my first monthly pass (which did not rise in price) as it has become more economical.
I drive two american cars (not at the same time mind you), My Tahoe get’s a whopping 15 mpg…the other day when I filled it up it cost $64!! Episcopus told me long ago that driving an SUV was a very un-christian thing to do (he equated it to farting in God’s face), I’m starting to think at these gas prices, it might be time to repent! Thankfully my wife’s car gets about 30mpg…so I’ve been driving her car a lot lately (sure do miss all that horsepower and comfort though…)
BTW, I only put premium in my cars, and right now it is about $3.10 per gallon where I live.
Ironically, it is the “environmentalists” that we have to thank for the SUV in the first place. After they pushed through fuel efficiency standard laws for automobiles, the station wagon went the way of the passenger pigeon. Car manufacturers redesigned their station wagons into SUVs, which get classified as trucks and thus don’t have to meet the same standards.
Useful concept for the future: hydraulic despotism, except replace hydraulic with hydrocarbon.
I had a bunch of contractors out to bid on some landscaping work around my house. That has been scrapped, and insulation/siding changes are in the works instead.
I see your point, but I think it is a stretch to pull the responsiblity that far. For the “SUV” specifically yes, but not for inefficient cars in general. A matter of opinion of course.
Hmmm, I think we can blame the “environmentalists” here, too. They’re the ones who have prevented a large-scale shift to nuclear power (compare to the French who get almost 80% of their electricity from nuclear power).
I don’t think it’s any one person or group’s fault, personally… The human individual is intellegent, rational and generally willing to change, but the human collective is unmutable without force or radical social changes, does not see the world in a clear manner and quickly forms into smaller factions which attempt to destroy eachother in hopes of being the only faction and solving every problem they can find. But this only leads to the breakdown of the one large faction which, in turn, leads to squabbling over petty ideology by the new smaller ones, which were concieved, in essence, by the same processes that they themselves create with their quest for control. All that (somewhat nonsensically) said, we’re ( I’m not referring to any one person or group of people) too busy bickering about what we think should be, and who is to blame for why what we think should be isn’t, to realize that no one is to blame. Things are the way they are.
I just think that too many people worry about who is to blame instead of what can be done to rectify any mistakes that were made in the past and prevent any more from being made. But it’s a vicious cycle and there’s really very little we can do to change or stop it in this cowardly old world… haha 
what we need is a new one… preferably brave…
and that’s my rant for today.
Dear good God, you don’t want to do that right NOW! 
Believe me. There are many beautiful things, but insecurity is growing stronger eveyday.
I quite lied there. It costs like US$0.005 to fill up the entire tank. And yet, almost small little nobody uses it.
I envy nations who have nuclear power. My cousin works in a nuclear plant in Canada, and has told me about the process they use in Canada &c… He even promised me some Uranium pieces
A Spartan world… 
Here I’m afraid we’ll just have to disagree. I think one of the major problems we have in government (and in modern society in general) is a lack of personal accountability. Energy policies, for example, don’t just appear – someone made a decision and enacted law. The lack of accountability leads people to make decisions and take actions without forethought. Often the goal is short-term political favor without concern for the long-term consequences.
Blame can be used as a distraction, I’ll agree, but to learn from the past we must actually understand what happened and why. Often this requires bringing another’s failings to light, no matter how politically incorrect it may seem.
Democracy just doesn’t work. We need oligarchy of accountable, intelligent people. People that are created and educated to that purpose, to rule the new world. The brave one.
I suppose the saddest thing about all of this is that (a) scientists warned about the fact we would run out of oil this century at least 30 - 40 years ago, (b) politicians totally ignored this or told us it was untrue, (c) now it is happening and no country seems to have prepared. You can apply this same scenario to most other things happening now, from global warming to pandemic viruses.
The next time we have an election I think I might start writing to the candidates to ask them to publish a “plan for the future 50 years” so we can all read it before we vote. Now how much would you like to bet that not one single politician will have even thought about such a thing!