re: No Gas Day May 15th

I saw No Gas Day May 15th referencing an activist plea posted on http://www.nogasday.com/ .. essentially the plea goes that if we all were to not buy gasoline on a given day, that it would cause a blip which would get the attention of the gas companies, and it would make a big impact on gasoline prices. A bit of yahoogling showed me why this sounded familiar, the same message has been in e-mail chain letters going back to 1999. It's been my opinion all along that this cannot have any lasting effect, and yahoogling "no gas day" turns up a bunch of articles saying the same doubt.

There's a general principle here with a couple other examples besides No Gas Day. Let's start with the examples:-

Earth Day, April 22: The agenda is to raise the importance of the Earth in peoples mind. T-shirts with pictures of the planet reading "Love Your Mother" are very popular.

Christmas, December 22: Supposedly a spiritual celebration that's about peace and love and compassion.

International Workers Day, May 1 .. Labor Day, early September: A day of recognition of workers, the rights of labor, etc.

Iodays labor union protest against the war, May 1, 2008: Labor unions on the West Coast have organized an anti-war protest aimed at shutting down the ports for one day. These same labor unions staged anti-war protests 5 years ago in the beginning of the war, and those protests incited massive police activity to shut down the protests.

A common thread is to anoint a given day for recognition of a given agenda with the goal that this agenda will be adopted by everybody because they were exposed to the agenda for a day. Since I'm interested in the agenda of ending gasoline use, let's focus on that..

There are lots of great reasons to stop using gasoline. Gasoline is the root of problems from greater incidence of diseases, environmental degradation, foreign policy disasters around the world, the resource wars in the middle east, and unless our society gets serious about finding alternatives to oil the peak oil situation is going to force us back to the stone age. So, yeah, I'm in support of the general idea of ending gasoline use.

The United States used an average of 385 million US liquid gallons (1.46 gigalitres) of gasoline (petrol) each day in 2005, amounting to 44% of the total U.S. consumption of petroleum products. It's inconceivable that avalanche of oil use could be affected by a single day's blip from a few people passing around emails getting a few other people to stop buying oil. Even if the email campaign were effective, even if "No Gas Day" were to become as widely known as "Earth Day", would it make any difference?

The root problem is the addiction to oil. Once No Gas Day is over the participants will have a car with fewer gallons of gasoline and they'll still eventually buy some gasoline.

What's really necessary is the meme many were saying on Earth Day, "Make Earth Day every Day". So.. please.. if you are going to celebrate this day, then make "No Gas Day Every Day"!!!

Links: 

No Gas Day May 15th

Links: 

http://www.nogasday.com/

Links: 

http://hubpages.com/hub/How_To_Force_The_Oil_Companies_To_Lower_The_Price_Of_Gas

Links: 

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/nogas.asp

Links: 

http://www.michaelbrazellmurray.com/wordpress/?p=657

Links: 

http://www.adammessinger.com/2007/05/14/no-gas-day-wont-work

Links: 

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/gasout.asp

Links: 

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/gasout.html

Links: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_usage_and_pricing

External Media

Gas price drop an attempt to skew the election?

Before the November 2006 elections I wrote an article: Dropping gasoline prices, and the mid-term elections pondering whether the dropping gas prices were an attempt to skew the elections. It seemed and still does seem very unlikely. At the same time it is curious why gas prices, which had been well above $3 per gallon over the summer of 2006 fell so precipitously since then.

CNN Money noticed the same thing Gasoline prices up, end 3 month slump which led the Salon.COM war-room to ponder Coincidence? Election over, gas prices up again.

In the interest of relying on facts ...

Here is the chart from before the election, captured on October 8, 2006:

And here is the chart today, November 25, 2006, generated using the same parameters:

What's interesting is the crude oil price has leveled off, and the gasoline price has started to come back up.

Hmmm....?

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Dropping gasoline prices, and the mid-term elections

It's the Fall of 2006, and we're about 30 days away from the elections. The Bush team and the Republicans overall are in a hurt. And curiously the price for gasoline has fallen dramatically in the last few weeks. I've seen some chatter that perhaps the Republicans, and especially the Neocons/Bush camp, have asked the oil companies to help by lowering the gas prices for the duration. Since some of the voter angst is the high price for gasoline, maybe a lower price would diminish it?

Hey, it's a theory anyway. I haven't seen any credible claim of this. But it is curious that just a month or two ago the price for gasoline in the SF Bay Area was well over $3 per gallon, and yesterday I saw a station selling it for $2.40 per gallon and others in the $2.50 to $2.60 range. That's a $.60 per gallon drop (20%) or thereabouts. What could have caused such a steep decrease?

This article in Slate: The Oil Conspiracy: Is the Bush administration manipulating oil prices to win elections? is going over this issue.

The conclusion seems to be that, no, political leaders are generally unable to affect commodity pricing in the first place. But there are some leverage points, especially for an administration like GW Bush's that is so heavily in bed with the Oil industry and the Saudi Royalty.

The Slate article relates that in Bob Woodward's book State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III Prince Bandar told Bush that they could increase oil production, which would lower the oil price, and do that to help the election results. The article doesn't say whether oil production actually rose in 2004, and it doesn't say whether it rose now.

The Slate article does mention this: Bush takes aim at rising gasoline prices ... this details an announcement made in August 2006 to attack high gasoline prices. The main effect was to order the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stop making its purchases "until the fall" (conveniently after the election). By doing so that will leave a little more gasoline in the market, reducing some of the supply/demand pressures, hopefully leading to lower prices.

The other idea mentioned in the Slate article is pretty tricky to understand. It has to do with trading of commodity futures contracts. Goldman Sachs, a company formerly led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, recently adjusted the mix of commodities in an index it controls. Changing that mix of commodities then would have caused commodities traders to suddenly dump oil on the market, lowering the price.

What I was able to gather is the price for gasoline falls every year at the end of the summer. In the summer there is a lot of driving as people go on vacation trips driving around the country. The law of supply/demand says that when demand is high, such as the summer driving season, either the supply has to rise also or the price will rise.

Here's an interesting chart

It shows the gas prices over the last three years in Seattle, San Jose and Atlanta. You'll see that generally the price has been upward over the last three years. But there's some interesting ideas you can draw from it.

The first, and the reason for including this chart, is the cyclic price changes. At least for 2005 and 2006 the cycle is much the same. There's a price increase in the late Spring and during the Summer, with a dropoff in the Fall. In 2005 the price increase was extended because of the disruption due to Hurricane Katrina. In 2004 that cycle didn't happen for some reason, with a late price peak just before the election.

The other things I see are: The price for gasoline largely is determined for the crude oil price. And some parts of the country, represented by Atlanta in this picture, curiously pay a lot less for oil than do other parts of the country. Here is a chart of gas prices per county that demonstrates the price differential.

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