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Monday, April 21, 2008
Any relief to high gas prices?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With gas prices in the Metro Atlanta area already approaching $3.50 per gallon for regular, the Secretary-General of OPEC, Abdullah el al-Badri, predicted Sunday that they’ll go even higher. World oil prices reached a new high on Friday, at $117 a barrel.
There’s the weakness of the dollar, speculation and some supply and demand concerns pushing up the price. The OPEC chief said production would be increased if they thought that higher prices were due to shortages, but they aren’t.”But how much higher it will go, of course it depends on a number of things: the political situation, whether there is a natural catastrophe, whether there are speculations in the market, whether there are strikes in certain producing countries”al-Badri said.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, who’ll be the Republican standard-bearer, has suggested suspending the 18.5-cent per gallon federal tax, though price increases would have consumed that in the past two weeks. The nation could temporarily halt purchases for the strategic petroleum reserves, but that’s not expected either.
Is anybody planning any significant change in lifestyle because of high prices? My brother just parked his pick-up truck — his vehicle of choice for all travel — and purchased a small Toyota that, he proudly announced over the weekend, had delivered 41.7 miles per gallon on a 250-mile trip. As for me, other than organizing routine trips more carefully and consolidating those to run errands, I’m still buying and paying.
Supporters of buses and rail think these high prices make their case. But the reality is that buses and trains don’t connect one in a hundred of the starting and destination trips for, I’d say, 95 percent of the people who live in Metro Atlanta. And what’s more, there’s no affordable way to create a system that would.
So for now, we reduce demand as much as possible and wait for the speculators’ bubble to burst.
Check out where to find cheaper gas and ways to stretch your dollar.
