about the gas situation...what can we do???

[carolwicks]

they are talking about gas going up to $4.00 a gal. in the next month and even to $6.00 in the near future. im wondering who will be able to afford racing or even traveling. ive been conserving mine for several months...only go out when i have to...
the truckers wont be able to afford it which means we may not even get alot of things we take for granted! food, clothing, construction supplies, etc...
the only way i can see this stopped is if every person who drives can go a couple weeks without going near a gas station... if everyone stops long enough they will have to come down.
what else can we do? im curious what you guys think we can do to stop the insanity! it costs over $50 to fill a gas tank now. how can the average person afford to drive?
lets think of some solutions and maybe a mass e-mailing....
carolwicks (OZ)

[flvideo]

$4 is cheap

Hey Carol, I have been paying over $4 for a while. It cost me a little over $100 to fill my truck. Its diesel though. I'm not an advocate of government intervention, but I don't see any other way. The cost of a barrel of oil is at an all time high I think the last I heard $112 a barrel. That said, I heard a report on CNN a while back that Exon made a $17,000,000 PROFIT on the backs of working america. I can't understand why a comany has to make that much. Thats profit, after all expenses are paid. Thats ridiculus as far as I can see. Fuel is a factor in every thing I do any more. We went to Alabama
with 4 or 5 in a vehicle. Bob.............

[Todd McCreary]

I'm not an advocate of government intervention, but I don't see any other way.

you don't see any other way?

how bout getting rid of government interference?

how about stringing your representative the next time the idiot starts making promises to ban all oil drilling off the coast of Florida or in the Great Lakes or in ANWAR or about roadblocking the development of our own oil shales in the Eastern Rockies?

how about not making it practically impossible to build a new refinery or power plant or nuke plant anywhere?

[flvideo]

Point well taken!

I agree Todd but if they let the oil companies go they will still Gouge the public. I well know about the Govenments interference. I am retired from FPL and have been for 10 years, but before I retired it took an average of 10 to 12 years to permit a power plant and longer for a Nuke as you call it. I guess some one is going to have make a decision, do we want to live or have a clean environment. We could probably do both if we really tryed. I think the ultimate idea is to find an alternate source of fuel so we aren't as dependant on oil. In europe they have run Gasoline engines on hydrogen and maybe other places. Another thing I don't quite understand is why diesel is so high. It is a by product of gasoline isn't it? Thats the shame of the whole thing. The independant truckers are soon going to be out of bussiness at the rate we are going. Thats going to be good for the economy, HUH! Bob.....

[Cara]

Oil was at $118.30 a barrel at closing on Wednesday. AAA states that regular gas will be about $3.75 a gallon by June in Florida. Someplaces are already that so I expect it be higher. We cut back by not racing which really hurts when you love to do it. If you cannot afford to fix the race car, then you know you cannot afford gas to get there. My husband is looking at other ways to get to work like bicycling or getting an electric scooter. I only have to go a short distance for school but I have to chauffer my mom everyplace. This summer I guess we are staying home and cancelling any travel plans.
I had read several articles that even if we "boycott" and not by gas for a day or two that it wouldn't matter because it will still go up in price.
We definitely know the President is not going to do anything about it and not hearing too much from any of them running for office either about really fixing the problem.


Would love to go racing and or even go watch a race!!!

[Benny The Mule]

Oil companies are businesses just like any other, the government does not (require) you purchase oil so it cannot and will not be government regulated. oil itself is publicly traded.i'm not thrilled with the opec deal seeing how they're getting so rich they are self proclaiming themselves princes etc. The sad part is businesses are making a profit off of a product they sell to us. And, we're still gobbling it up!

The sad part is they have every right as a business to make a profit just like any other company. greed is what is killing us.....example, in 1998 (summer) gas was traded at $55 a barrel and i paid $1.03 a gallon. Today it is $110 or so a gallon and i'm paying $3.45...........based on an average price per barrel i should be paying around $2.06. Same refinaries, same pipelines, same suppliers.


Greed is the problem. look at fortune 500, wal-mart is no 1 and mobile is no 2, wal-mart profit is 1/3rd what mobiles is.

Well, i gotta go fill my truck up so i can go check on my crews in the field, (it's too far to walk).

[carolwicks]

but.... how do we fix it????

we all know there is a problem and why... but what can we do to fix it?
i agree with flvideo. we need an alternate clean way to support transportation. but it will take forever.
stop buying huge gas guzzling vehicles would help. i plan my day. i go in a circle instead of back and forth. lucky for me, everywhere i need to go on a daily basis is in a 5 mile radius. once a week i go racing and that is a 20 mile round trip. i use about a tank of gas every 2 weeks. alot less than i used to use but still over $100 a month...my sons ram deisel costs him way over $100 a fill.
someone just said it. alot of the problem is greed and vanity. we need to change our ways. think of how much we could save by taking a vespa or a moped to work if you dont work too far from home. teens could do the same going to school. we dont have mass transit in Port Charlotte so without a personal vehicle no one could get around. however, most of us work in Port Charlotte and could easily find cheaper ways to commute.
i know these ideas are like putting a bandaid on an amputation... so please help with a solution. maybe we could do something very positive to help our crisis end or at least be easier on us. there are alot of very intelligent people who read and write on this board. and what is more important to a racer than fuel and tires?
carolwicks (OZ)

[The Ocala Speedway]

Travesty, the only word to describe it. Exxon just announced a $9 BILLION dollar profit the first quarter. Last year it was only $123 BILLION for the year. We have a President that won't even make it a topic of conversation. It's disgusting.

[dnsno]

Alternative fuel? Why? We, the USA, supposedly were running out of oil back in the mid nineteen seventies. Did we? NO. We all beleived our "leader's" that we were about to. Thirty some odd years later, we are still producing this presious commodity. Running out of oil? I doubt it.

I worked in the oil fields of southwest Florida for a little over a year. I would probebly still be there if Exxon hadn't put in a pipe line from the southwestern Hendry County and northeastern Collier County area's.
This pipe line was installed to transport oil from these oil wells to the east coast. BTW, seventy percent of what get's loaded at the Port of Everglades goes across the ocean to Japan and other countries.

Over two hundred producing oil wells were shut off because the oil company said they could not afford to maintain the "personell structure" that kept these wells in production. Thus they were shut down, putting over five hundred hard working butt busting oil field workers out of a job. To this day these wells are still capped off!! And NO they were not about to run out. My information comes from three differant Exxon employee's that took daily readings as to how much these wells were producing. These oil wells were installed back in the fifties, and were still keeping there above average production of oil flowing in the late nineteen eighty's. We're running out? I highly doubt it.

As far as diesel fuel goes, it is a by product of all other fossel fuels. The oil companies saw another way of boosting thier profit margine from the pockets of the American truckers.
People have to eat. The majority of our food products (something we absolutly can't live without) are transported by trucks. The clothes we wear, the toilet paper we use, the shoe's on your feet, the gas we put in our vehicles, etc.
Some money hungry jackass saw the idea on how to boost oil company profits and boom, this person gets a big cut of the incomeing profit's from the trucker's pocket. And the ball keeps on rolling in favor of the profit margin.

Some American's saw the price of gas climbing higher and higher, so they run out and buy a diesel powered vehicle. Remember braggin about how your diesel was cheaper than gas? You don't hear about it anymore do you? The oil companies saw that too. They start raising the price of diesel.

After spending over half of my life behind the wheel of a truck, I watched the price of diesel fuel go from sixty five cents to now over four dollors a gallon, making it the highest priced fuel we can't live without. At the time, gasoline was eighty eight cents a gallon. Can someone explain to me why, after so many years of being a lower priced fuel, that it has jumped so dramaticly? Or did I answer my own question already?

I would like to see half the trucking industry shut down for one week. Our economy would go bonkers trying to figure out what to do. Think about it.

Now we are being told we might have a rice shortage. Remember when there was a toilet paper shortage? It was just a rumor that someone started and the average American consumer believed it. That created a run on paper product's. That made the price of paper go up. Paper shortage? Now this so called rice shortage is causing a sort of "panic" for some people. Watch the price go up.

We can go on and on about the economic's of trying to live in America. But the question will still be the same, what can be done about it?

[Boneman]

We have the world's largest coal reserves; enough to last for hundreds of years. Did you know gasoline can be made from coal? It is an old and proven technology. Why aren't we mining our coal like hell? We are the Saudi Arabia of coal!

Instead we are wasting time and energy on stupid ethanol. Did you know it takes 1.29 gallons of petroleum to make a gallon of ethanol? Could anything be more stupid? Have you noticed the inflation in the price of food? It is tightly tied to the ethanol debacle. Farmers world-wide are switching from edible crops to corn used for fuel, so naturally inflation kicks in on food.

President Boneman would be on the TV everyday demanding to get moving on nuclear power. We should start by building a few new plants in every state. Even France, a country I seldom compliment, has done it right with nuclear power. It provides 75-80% of their energy needs, and can power the increasing number of electric cars in that country.

Who has done the most to hurt the environment? "Environmentalists" that is who. Because we have been stupid and listened to celebrities, there have been no nuclear plants built in the USA for more thant 25 years. We are not mining and we are not drilling into our oil reserves. Everything that could help gets blocked by some interest group: windmills disrupt the view from the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, wave energy generators have to be placed in the migratory paths of fish or something sillly like that. Solar has limited potential, but still it is over-regulated and over-zoned.

The Cubans and Chinese are drilling for oil 30 miles from our coast in the Gulf, but we are not. How much sense does that make? All 3 of the current candidates want to tax us more to "decrease consumption". That trasnlates into economic ruin while not generating a single watt of energy more.
Another typically ineffective government action.

Shouldn't we be discussing belly buttons or something?

[carolwicks]

environmentalists?

ok..well we are still talking about the problems we know we have but we havent touched on what we can do as a multitude to force changes...
if it werent for environmentalists we would have to go to a museum to see a tree, a zoo to see cows and horses.....etc... nuclear leaks can kill cities full of people, phosphate mining will destroy most of florida and it doesnt bring us anything. it is going to china! ...the trash we are dumping into the ocean will very shortly come back to haunt us. actually this can go on til infinity. WHAT CAN WE DO TO GET GAS PRICES DOWN? do we write to congressmen? ROFLLL that ought to do nothing! do we park our vehicles for a couple weeks so they have get rid of excess gas supplies? do the trucks all stop? well if they do how will we work? all of our supplies come via trucks... our economy will only get worse... i sure dont know but like i said, you guys are really intelligent and i would love to hear of ways we can do something as a multitude. you dont go out and buy all the rice to get prices down. you stop eating it and you let it pile up until the rice people GET IT! until they realize they dont have our backs up against a wall. are we so greedy we cant stay home more often and dont run out every day for bread. freeze a couple loafs and go out every couple days instead. we CAN conserve some of our energy... sometimes i get on here and i babble so much i make myself nervous... bear with me... i really want to do something to help and i am frustrated so i think maybe i can say one tiny thing that might matter. sorry for the babbling.
carol OZ

[BRIAN DORER]

If you don't already know you are paying about $4.50 a gallon now because are government gives the oil company's 18 billion dollar a year tax break plus allows the enormous profits to be made. Why should they be give a tax break they say they use it for research. Research what how much a ceo is worth? Furthermore, our government lets business move over seas and then bring thier products back to the usa without paying high terriffs why not make them pay terriffs that cost more than if they had produced it in America by american workers orginally? I say screw the tax breaks for every business if you like our city, country or state then open a business there but we should not have to give you an insentive to move here. 2 million a month gas bill in Irac, the terrorist were funded by the Sadia's so why did we go to Irac and no Sadia Arabia. Lets ask George (they fund my business ventures)

[OutsideLookingIn]

Priced Out

It's finally gotten too much. Used to run Orlando and took my lumps with either breaking even or minimal losses. Not anymore. With the price of gas and the increased expenses at Orlando, I would have to win to break even and that is having a normal night with no tires. Racing will really begin to suffer. Kudo's to those that can afford it, but sorry the fun is gone.

[Mr.Mafia]

A little factoid.Last year EXXON was 2nd on the fortune 500 list.Your know who was number 1 WALMART.I agree gas prices suck.When we invaded IRAQ the average IRAQI could fill there car up for 35cents go figure.We have no choice but to do more drilling for oil here and stop relying on the ARABS.For all we do for the world we should be getting oil for next to nothing.Just my opininion.

[The Ocala Speedway]

Hey is that you John?