We're above $4 a gallon, if you're keeping score

For the first time, the average all-United States price of a gallon of regular gasoline has risen above $4 a gallon.

For several months, I have been tracking the oil futures and spot markets. (My workmates can corroborate.)  A couple of weeks ago, I added the pump prices, and this morning the United States reached $4.005. That’s up 90 cents a gallon from a year ago.

So I’ll be spending the next little while thinking of ways to help our transit use.

9 Replies to “We're above $4 a gallon, if you're keeping score”

  1. Where I live, the gas is $4.29 a gallon. Not even two weeks ago it was $3.99. Fortunately, we only spent $60 on gas last month because hubby works from home. I can deal with the price increase, but it’s just the uncertainty and big jumps. It literally goes up ten cents at a time. So unpredictable.

  2. @h.s. I was tempted to change your typo in comment #2. Don’t want people to think you have gas a $3.29 in your neighborhood. Might cause traffic jams.

  3. For the upcoming summer season (April to September), motor gasoline markets are projected to exhibit an extraordinarily tight supply/demand balance.

    * Retail gasoline prices (regular grade) are expected to average $1.46 per gallon, 25 percent higher than last summer’s average of $1.17 per gallon. That projection also exceeds the previous (current-dollar) record summer average of $1.35 recorded in 1981. Nominal prices are expected to reach a peak of $1.52 per gallon in April—a new record–and decline steadily to $1.39 per gallon by September due to the impact of increases in world-wide crude oil production.

    That was the world that was–in 2000.

    Essentially, the price has tripled in 8 years. My gut is that we’ll at least flirt with $6/gal this year. The past is dead and gone; time to find out how to make public transportation work in and for most of the nation. It doesn’t, in much of it. Or to find alternatives. I just put a reservation down on a “2.5” seat (two plus child seat, not that I expect to need or use that half seat unless/until we have grandkids) plus cargo space vehicle (an Aptera) that gets in excess of 200 mpg (I’m still doubting the up to 300 that’s talked about). If they’d had a four seat version, I’d have done that–but that design is only in the 3-4 years away talking stage. I don’t think we’ll see the end of the gasoline powered vehicle for a while… but they’re actually going to have to be efficient now.

    Alas, we’re not going to get ours until 2010, it looks like. But that will allow me to start paying for it in advance, which is a fiscal discipline that I and the country could use as well…

  4. LOL – yes, actually you might want to go ahead and fix that for me. I realized it after I sent it but didn’t want to create comment clutter!

  5. It is a bit more expensive in my area, around 1,3 euro per litre, and in Central Europe the price is always higher than in Spain (their salaries are higher too!). But I remember that gas price in the USA used to be outrageously cheap, or that was my impression when I travelled to your country, so you are now rising to standard prices in the West. Being a country that produces petrol, I wonder how dry your pits are by now if you have these prices.

  6. Yes, I recall a gas station in 1994 selling gasoline for USD 0.77 a gallon, but that was surely an aberration.

    While the US is an oil producer and — perhaps more importantly, a refiner — our oil production peaked in the early 1970s and, as has been well established, our thirst for the stuff is boundless.

    I did get a small chuckle in translation. Oil comes from wells which are drying, while pits (=axilia) figuratively aren’t.

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