Gas prices may surge on 2006 green rules (57 cents by July)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10533856/

U.S. consumers recovering from record high gasoline costs last summer may now face a nearly 60-cent price surge next year because of stricter environmental regulations, an industry expert said.

The introduction of lower sulfur requirements for gasoline and diesel combined with a shift in gasoline additives could reduce supplies and create problems for refiners trying to produce fuel to meet the new specifications, according to analyst Trilby Lundberg.

"We expect 2006's price surge to be less severe than 2005's, but more severe than any other year on record," Lundberg said in a report. "While we don't expect retail gasoline to revisit the $3 level in 2006, we do expect a 57 cent hike by July."

Motorists in the world's biggest oil consuming nation saw average gasoline pump prices spike to $3.00 a gallon in September after hurricanes Katrina and Rita shut U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Prices have fallen to around $2.20 a gallon since then as plants restored operations.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

1. Yep, It's all the fault of the environmentalist nazi terrorists

Certainly not anything to do with money-grubbing corporations.

Nope.

Not at all.

[phantom power]

6. If (by some miracle) it *is* our fault...

I say: Good. Cheap gas is a delusion, and always has been. We've never taken the true external costs of our fossil fuel usage into account. If the price goes up to $3/gallon next year, it *still* won't be taking all the real costs into account.

[Skink]

2. Meanwhile Hybrids become more and more common.

Bring it on!!

[tecelote]

3. BTW - it's a $0.57 hike, not 57%.

[RamboLiberal]

5. Thanks - I fixed it

Must've had a dyslexic moment!

[tecelote]

7. Thanks for posting.

57 cents or 57%. Doesn't change the sentiment.

Can you imagine if, for the past ten or twenty years, we gave the oil subsidies (over 2 billion this year alone)to research and development on alternative energy sources instead of to big oil? Can you imagine what good would be done.

We can be sure that it would not hurt the economy. It would hurt big oil but it would be what America is about as far as the economy is concerned, American Innovation.

- Subsidizing big oil during their most profitable year on history is a sin as it is. Especially with such a deficit.

[AX10]

4. Of course, let's blame the enviromentalists.

:mad:

[nosmokes]

8. blame me! i don't care. if it were up to me gas woulda

been $5 a gal years ago so folks would have been motivated enough to demand energy effeciency and alternative fuels instead of allowing head in the sand business as usual. and maybe, just maybe, spurred a little more use of mass transit and carpools and gotten way a bit from the *mygod given right as a merkan to 8 bored out cylinders with headers and no pollution control devices.*

[nonconformist]

9. New meme: blame the environmentalists for high gas prices

Coming soon off the lips of an inane freeper near you!

[WI_DEM]

10. Good, because that will hit people in the pockebook and that

will hurt Bush and the Republicans in '06. With lots of people only when it affects THEM do they start to pay attention and get mad.

[no_hypocrisy]

11. In NJ, that's just the beginning. New governor is considering either a

hike in the gas tax or a novel approach of having drivers pay a surcharge at the pump for the aggregate of miles driven between fill-ups.

Shoot me, shoot me now.

[IDemo]

12. George Will claims today that anti-ANWR's have a hidden agenda

Sorry, can't find a link to today's column, but George Will claims ANWR holds substantial reserves (wrong), and that those opposing its development do so not out of genuine environmental concerns, but for strictly political reasons.

The total estimated recoverable reserves from ANWR would in fact offer relatively little of America's petroleum usage over the next few decades required to explore and extract it.

But who's politicising, George?